That shall be a certain sign
Of the end of Monkton's line.
Dwindling ever faster, faster,
Dwindling to the last-left master;
From mortal ken, from light of day,
Monkton's race shall pass away."

"The prediction seems almost vague enough to have been uttered by an
ancient oracle," said I, observing that he waited, after repeating the
verses, as if expecting me to say something.

"Vague or not, it is being accomplished," he returned. "I am now the
'last-left master'--the last of that elder line of our family at which
the prediction points; and the corpse of Stephen Monkton is not in the
vaults of Wincot Abbey. Wait before you exclaim against me. I have more
to say about this. Long before the Abbey was ours, when we lived in the
ancient manor-house near it (the very ruins of which have long since
disappeared), the family burying-place was in the vault under the Abbey
chapel. Whether in those remote times the prediction against us was
known and dreaded or not, this much is certain: every one of the
Monktons (whether living at the Abbey or on the smaller estate in
Scotland) was buried in Wincot vault, no matter at what risk or what
sacrifice. In the fierce fighting days of the olden time, the bodies of
my ancestors who fell in foreign places were recovered and brought back
to Wincot, though it often cost not heavy ransom only, but desperate
bloodshed as well, to obtain them. This superstition, if you please
to call it so, has never died out of the family from that time to the
present day; for centuries the succession of the dead in the vault at
the Abbey has been unbroken--absolutely unbroken--until now. The place
mentioned in the prediction as waiting to be filled is Stephen Monkton's
place; the voice that cries vainly to the earth for shelter is the
spirit-voice of the dead. As surely as if I saw it, I know that they
have left him unburied on the ground where he fell!"

He stopped me before I could utter a word in remonstrance by slowly
rising to his feet, and pointing in the same direction toward which his
eyes had wandered a short time since.

"I can guess what you want to ask me," he exclaimed, sternly and loudly;
"you want to ask me how I can be mad enough to believe in a doggerel
prophecy uttered in an age of superstition to awe the most ignorant
hearers. I answer" (at those words his voice sank suddenly to a
whisper), "I answer, because _Stephen Monkton himself stands there at
this mo