She was going sadly upstairs to her own room (after seeing Mr. Tew planted in front of a pigeon pie), when an idea flashed across her brain which for a moment or two seemed mentally to blind her. But it was a notion at once so wild and extravagant that, after drawing one long breath, her hands went involuntarily to her head, and she said to herself, "My reason must be deserting me." For all that, she could not thrust the notion from her; indeed, it had taken such a firm grip of her that when she reached her room she found herself under compulsion to sit down and face it, and, however bizarre and impracticable it had at first seemed, to consider it dispassionately from a common-sense point of view. The idea which had so startled her, and without any conscious leading up to it on her own part, was nothing less than, in the guise of a highwayman, to stop Mr. Tew when on his way back to Arkrigg and despoil him of the will. When a young spark of nineteen or twenty, Dick Cortelyon, on the occasion of one of his brief visits at home, had attended a fancy ball in the neighborhood in the character of a gentleman of the road. In the wardrobe in his room upstairs--a room left untouched since the date of his quarrel with his father--the dress, wig, mask, pistols, and other items of his make-up on that occasion were stored to the present day, a fact which was within Nell's cognizance. The picture of her cousin, masked and ready to set out for the ball, had impressed her girlish imagination very vividly at the time, and had often recurred to her memory since; and this recollection it must have been, acting through some sub-conscious channel, which, while asking herself despairingly how she could get possession of the will, had inspired her with the idea of turning highwayman in reality--for one night only. We know at what decision she arrived. Instead of scouting the idea and casting it from her, as ninety-nine young women out of every hundred would have done, she determined, _coûte que coûte_, to put it to a practical issue. Whatever risks might be connected with, or follow on, the affair she was prepared to face, if only she could thereby insure the destruction of her uncle's iniquitous will. Fortunately for her, when she came to consider, several things seemed to work in favor of her scheme, desperate as at first sight it had appeared.