t, the brute was gone!"

He is flushed, excited, angry; Jack is cooler and graver. His face, as
he bares his head to the light breeze, looks pale.

Honor divines instinctively that he, like herself, has seen something
supernatural in this apparition.

But Launce scoffs at any such idea.

"It is some blackguard," he says scornfully, "got up on purpose to
scare folks! He was within an ace of getting his skull broken for his
pains."

Is it their overwrought fancy, or does a low mocking laugh float back
to them?

Honor shivers.

"Let us get into the house," she says. "I feel as if I could not
breathe out here; and don't let us talk any more about it, please!"

But Launce cannot hold his tongue; he does nothing but scoff at their
credulity, and when they reach the house the first thing he does is to
go straight to the dining-room and tell the whole story to his father.

The old man looks grave as he listens; it even seems to Honor if a
little of the ruddy color dies out of his face.

"Best let these things alone, my boy," he says at last.

In his own young days such things as warnings were neither scoffed at
nor disbelieved in.

"Let us keep our powder and shot for men of bone and muscle like
ourselves, Launce, and not waste them on shadows."

If he had said, "Let us ask the old abbot up to supper, and treat him
to a jorum of whiskey-punch," Launce could not have looked more
surprised.

"Well," he says in a tone if disgust, "I did think you had more sense,
father, than to believe in a fellow walking about some hundred and
fifty years after his own funeral."

The old man smiles, but he says no more; and Honor feels that the
appearance of this phantom has cast a gloom over the house that was
scarcely needed.

"And Launce ought to have had more sense than to talk to the _pater_
about it," she says to herself, as she watches the squire's anxious
face. "He ought to have remembered that the last time that horrid old
abbot was seen about poor grandpapa was shot; and of course everybody
said the abbot had come to warn him."

CHAPTER V.

After that night no more is seen or heard of the old abbot.

"Wait till the moonlight nights are past, and he'll turn up again,"
Launce says in his scoffing way.

But the nights are dark enough now--it is an almost sunless September,
and yet they see nothing of the figure. To Honor has come an additional
trouble--the engagement between her brother and Belle Delorme is b