Jasper Denzil, as he slowly made his elaborate toilet on the sunny September morning which succeeded to the eventful night on which he had espied from his window Ruth’s slight form gliding across the lonely park, turned over many things in his mind. His man, who groaned over the dull monotony of rural existence, and longed to be once more in Mount Street or Bond Street lodgings, silently opined, as he applied the ivory-backed brushes to his master’s hair or removed the silver-gilt stoppers of the scent-bottles, that ‘the captain’ was brooding over his turf calamities. But he was wrong. Jasper’s reverie was on a different theme. Who or what was this mysterious Miss Willis, this interesting orphan, whom regard for the mythical major her defunct papa had induced Sir Sykes to take into the bosom of his family? The conversation which he had overheard when lurking in the frowsy garden of _The Traveller’s Rest_ recurred again and again to his memory, and served to explain much, but not all. That the presence beneath his roof-tree of Ruth Willis had been imposed upon the baronet by Hold’s importunity, he well knew. That he had with his own ears heard Hold describe her as his sister, he well remembered, but he recalled too the sneering tone in which the adventurer had claimed kindred with the Indian orphan. Of one thing alone did Captain Denzil feel sure. Ruth, be her understanding with Hold what it might, was a lady, and no blood-relation of the rough rover who claimed to be her brother. Who then _was_ this Ruth? Again and again Jasper’s thoughts flew back to the little sister that had died so early, and whose untimely death was reported to have made the owner of Carbery Chase the morose joyless recluse that he had long been. Could it be—was it possible that the child had not died at all, that a false registry, a sham burial, had thrown dust in credulous eyes, and that the missing member of the family, hidden for years from all eyes, had at length been introduced under a fictitious name into the household? A profound distrust of their fellow-creatures is usually a cardinal point of belief with young men of such tastes and habits as those of Jasper; nor did he find it difficult to accredit Sir Sykes with concealed villainy of some sort, or Miss Willis with not, as in sporting language he pithily paraphrased it, ‘running square.’ But he did desire to find a conceivable motive of some kind; and in the absence of that was driven to speculations too wild to shape themselves in rational form.