fact—a sort of absurd country superstition—that owing to some ancient ancestral impiety, even when the ghost ceased to be heard of in the long portrait-gallery at Stoke, over the great staircase—which had been invisible to the family alone—then somewhere or other a Willoughby was mad. Often had the colonel smiled at it, when merely a younger brother in the army; a wound once received in his head in America, which had cost him delirious days and nights, seemed formerly to entitle him doubly to his smile at the corroboration, when restored to full health: nay, from some cause, he had found himself thinking of it once or twice in the full blaze of the streets of Paris, with their vivid reminiscences—though his smile had been but faint, now he was the younger brother no longer. For _why_, really, after all, had he come to Paris in particular, or lingered there, persuading himself under so many different forms about its convenience, the novelty to his children, the advantage of his brother’s banker, the little legacy, the comparative privacy, the rapid post, or the many notices of places to let? Why, in that indirect way, had he sought to make inquiries of the police, and caught himself listening to words in the street, of unknown suicides, baffled investigations, and French ennui? Why had he mechanically shrunk from the Boulevards and rushing St Honoré, yet glanced askance at windows full of faces, or looked again with an irresistible suspicion, to see if he recognised or was recognised by any one—not merely on that day, but on previous ones also? Actually, in the hot, beating sun, it had for a moment or two resembled the preface to his fever in the colonies, after that affair with their rabble of militia, among whom he had fancied he saw a known visage disguised; and the strong effort of his understanding which recovered him had only brought more keenly the sudden question—whether his brother indeed, or he himself, had been touched with the germs of a growing madness. There had been strange horror in the thought. For, had there really been a deliberate, sober meaning in his brother’s stray purposes, through the confusion of all his neglect, and though cut off by death? While the quick, clear self-suspicion had seemed to pierce his own mind with shame, how, amidst an uneasiness to associate with his countrymen, he was still traversing Paris everywhere, under cover of guidance to his family, mingling private anxieties with the grandeur of royal edifices, and continuing to expect some chance vestige of things which his brother might have chosen wisely to leave in silence. Since his succession to Stoke he must have been altering insensibly. Even selfish feelings, impatient wishes, hidden thoughts, or half-fretful expressions towards her who had been so long his solace, had then recurred to mind with a painful surprise; compared with which, his brother’s eccentricity appeared innocent indeed, sadly as his earlier follies had brought it on.