e we had left Naples I had
purposely avoided exciting him by talking on the useless and shocking
subject of the apparition by which he believed himself to be perpetually
followed. Just now, however, he seemed so calm and collected--so little
likely to be violently agitated by any allusion to the dangerous topic,
that I ventured to speak out boldly.

"Does the phantom still appear to you," I asked, "as it appeared at
Naples?"

He looked at me and smiled.

"Did I not tell you that it followed me everywhere?" His eyes wandered
back again to the vacant space, and he went on speaking in that
direction as if he had been continuing the conversation with some third
person in the room. "We shall part," he said, slowly and softly, "when
the empty place is filled in Wincot vault. Then I shall stand with Ada
before the altar in the Abbey chapel, and when my eyes meet hers they
will see the tortured face no more."

Saying this, he leaned his head on his hand, sighed, and began repeating
softly to himself the lines of the old prophecy:

When in Wincot vault a place
Waits for one of Monkton's race--
When that one forlorn shall lie
Graveless under open sky,
Beggared of six feet of earth,
Though lord of acres from his birth--
That shall be a certain sign
Of the end of Monktons line.
Dwindling ever faster, faster,
Dwindling to the last-left master;
From mortal ken, from light of day,
Monkton's race shall pass away."

Fancying that he pronounced the last lines a little incoherently, I
tried to make him change the subject. He took no notice of what I said,
and went on talking to himself.

"Monkton's race shall pass away," he repeated, "but not with _me_. The
fatality hangs over _my_ head no longer. I shall bury the unburied dead;
I shall fill the vacant place in Wincot vault; and then--then the new
life, the life with Ada!" That name seemed to recall him to himself. He
drew his traveling desk toward him, placed the packet of letters in it,
and then took out a sheet of paper. "I am going to write to Ada," he
said, turning to me, "and tell her the good news. Her happiness, when
she knows it, will be even greater than mine."

Worn out by the events of the day, I left him writing and went to bed.
I was, however, either too anxious or too tired to sleep. In this waking
condition, my mind naturally occupied itself with the discovery at
the convent and with the events to w