“I am like Banquo’s ghost,” he said. “I only bring gloom to you. My dream was of my lost love, Lady Alden, and you are right in thinking it haunts me. I ought to beg your pardon for speaking of gloomy subjects that must be distasteful to you, but it seems a strange thing that whenever I sleep or visit here, I dream of Clarice.” Lady Hermione’s face grew even more beautiful in its softened tenderness and compassion. “It is not strange,” she replied, gently, “you loved her so dearly, and Aldenmere is filled with memories of her. Tell us your dream.” “I dreamed,” he replied, “that she came to the door of my room, opened it, and stood there, just as I saw her last, her white dress covered with flowers. She called me by my name, ‘Kenelm--Kenelm Eyrle!’ The dream was so weird, Lady Alden, I thought, at first, she was really there. Then I remembered she was dead, and my heart began to beat strangely. ‘Kenelm,’ she said, ‘you are sleeping quietly here at Aldenmere, and I lie in my grave unavenged!’ I cried out to her that my life was spent in the vain effort to trace her murderers and bring them to justice. ‘Yet you sleep!’ she said, sadly, and the next moment she had disappeared. Lady Alden, all the description that ever I could give would never tell you how those words touched me. I have heard the saddest notes from an æolian harp, but they were not so sad as the voice which said to me: ‘Yet you sleep!’ Oh, Lady Alden, pardon me; I cannot bear even to remember it,” and, abruptly enough, Kenelm Eyrle rose and quitted the breakfast-room, leaving Sir Ronald and Lady Hermione looking anxiously at each other. CHAPTER XXX. IN DEFENSE OF CRIME. “He will never forget her,” said Lady Hermione, slowly, as the door closed after the unhappy man. “Oh, Ronald, if there be such a thing as haunting, do you think she haunts him?” But Sir Ronald was not so quick as usual with an answer to his wife’s question; he held little Clare in his arms so that the pallor of his face was hidden. “I think,” he replied, slowly, “that the discovery has become a mania with him: he will know no rest nor peace until he has found out something that troubles him.” “And do you think, really,” she continued, “that he will find any clue to it ever so small?” “My darling, I cannot say. Do not talk of it, Hermione; my soul seems to shiver at the bare recollection of the horror of the time.” “It was a cruel deed,” she said, thoughtfully, “a cruel, merciless deed. Clarice never hurt any one in her life. I cannot understand it. Do you know what I have often thought, Ronald?” “No,” he said, reluctantly, as though unwilling to pursue the subject. “I do not.”