Fifty years before, Luke Frender had ridden safely and well on the top of the rising trade-tide. When he sold his cotton-mill at Lutherton, and the business appertaining thereto, he was still a young man, with a taste for high living, and half a million sterling in the bank. Being a man of some imagination, and anxious to use his money in ways that had not occurred to his neighbours, he built himself a huge place in the very heart of the moors--not an ordinary square-built mansion with stuccoed walls, but a faithful imitation of the mediæval. There is a spacious courtyard on the north side, with a fountain in the middle, guarded by four great stone dogs. Loop-holes grin from the castle walls, and at one corner the steps of an unbuilt tower climb up to the second-floor windows. The windows are long, narrow, deep-browed; and here and there crumbling warts of masonry are tacked on to the walls. As it stands to-day, blackened by fifty years of the wind and rain and frost that is no child's play in the heart of Cranshaw Moor, Castle Frender--better known to the neighbourhood as Frender's Folly--has a certain dignity of its own. If it be palpably an imitation, it is at least not jerry-built. Its walls are thick and well knit; its situation is harsh to the verge of terror; and the smooth lawns, the sweeping circle of carriage drive, the banked masses of rhododendron that climb the valley sides, serve only to accentuate the unshorn roughness that hems them in. Nor is the Folly wanting in tradition of a sombre sort; short as its life has been, it has lived fast, just as its stones have greyed before their time. Luke Frender gambled away his money, his credit--his wife, too, some say--within its walls; and he shot himself in the big room overlooking the courtyard, which, half in mockery, he had built to serve as a private chapel. Then the friend who had robbed him of money and wife alike, lived on at the castle, and took to hard drinking, and died in raving delirium; his son, succeeding to the property, married one of his own housemaids, realized in a very brief time that he, too, had sold his honour to the devil, and avenged Luke Frender's end, in a fashion, by hanging himself to a beam in the same private chapel overlooking the great gateway and the courtyard. This was five years before Captain Laverack bought the place. Its history had become common talk throughout the countryside; prospective buyers shunned alike the grimness of its surroundings and the uncanny trend of its history, and Laverack had been able to buy it for a tithe of the amount which had originally been spent on the building. The shooting was excellent, and the situation exactly such a one as the Captain, in the present state of his domestic affairs, would have chosen before all others.