"There's a scritch in Sir Reginald's voice--mercy on us!--when he raises it so; it is the very cry of poor Master Harry--his last cry, when the knife pierced him. I'll never forget it!" The old woman clasped her fingers over her eyes, and shook her head slowly. "Well, that's over and ended this many a day, and past cure. We need not fret ourselves no more about it--'tis thirty years since." "Two-and-twenty the day o' the Longden steeple-chase. I've a right to remember it." She closed her eyes again. "Why can't they keep apart?" she resumed. "If father and son can't look one another in the face without quarrelling, better they should turn their backs on one another for life. Why need they come under one roof? The world's wide enough." "So it is--and no good meeting and argufying; for Mr. Dick will never open the estate," remarked Mr. Crozier. "And more shame for him!" said Mrs. Tansey. "He's breaking his father's heart. It troubles him more," she added in a changed tone, "I'm thinking, than ever poor Master Harry's death did. There's none living of his kith or kin cares about it now but Master David. He'll never let it rest while he lives." "He _may_ let it rest, for he'll never make no hand of it," said Crozier. "Would you object, Ma'am, to my making a glass of something hot?--you're gone very pale." Mrs. Tansey assented, and the conversation grew more comfortable. And so the night closed over the passions and the melancholy of Mortlake Hall. CHAPTER XVI. A MIDNIGHT MEETING. A couple of days passed; and now I must ask you to suppose yourself placed, at night, in the centre of a vast heath, undulating here and there like a sea arrested in a ground-swell, lost in a horizon of monotonous darkness all round. Here and there rises a scrubby hillock of furze, black and rough as the head of a monster. The eye aches as it strains to discover objects or measure distances over the blurred and black expanse. Here stand two trees pretty close together--one in thick foliage, a black elm, with a funereal and plume-like stillness, and blotting out many stars with its gigantic canopy; the other, about fifty paces off, a withered and half barkless fir, with one white branch left, stretching forth like the arm of a gibbet. Nearly under this is a flat rock, with one end slanting downwards, and half buried in the ferns and the grass that grow about that spot. One other fir stands a little way off, smaller than these two trees, which in daylight are conspicuous far away as landmarks on a trackless waste. Overhead the stars are blinking, but the desolate landscape lies beneath in shapeless obscurity, like drifts of black mist melting together into one wide vague sea of darkness that forms the horizon. Over this comes, in fitful moanings, a melancholy wind. The eye stretches vainly to define the objects that fancy sometimes suggests, and the ear is strained to discriminate the sounds, real or unreal, that seem to mingle in the uncertain distance.