And, surely, no one who was present at the deathbed of Sir Brian Kildhurm would have ventured to affirm that the blood of those two was unavenged. But over that grim scene let a veil be drawn. After all, Lady Kildhurm may have been innocent; and if Sir Brian found this out when it was too late, his fate was in no respect an enviable one. CHAPTER V. THE PROPHECY OF THE OAK. Ralph Kildhurm--that bold-spoken youngster who bearded his father at the castle gate--had a grand career. His life covers the period of the Puritan Revolution. He was a devoted adherent of King Charles; probably not more from personal sympathy with that unhappy monarch, than because he knew that the Stuarts' cause would have been his mother's, had she been alive. He met his death valiantly at Naseby. But he had married two years previously, and two sons came of the union, one of whom was born six months after his decease. This younger son was destined to be his successor. Our affair being the story of the Oak, and of the family mainly in so far as it was involved therewith, I can give few further details about Sir Ralph. He was the first baronet of his line. Ralph, it is said, had always taken great interest in the growth of the infant oak tree; as was no wonder, considering that it had been planted by his mother under circumstances so darkly impressive. At the time of Sir Brian's death, the tree had grown to about the height of a man: it flourished with strange vigour. The story of its origin was not unknown in the neighbourhood, and many quaint and fantastic sayings and prophecies concerning it were rife among the people of the neighbourhood. Its rapid growth was plausibly ascribed to the blood which had drenched the soil at its planting; and it was affirmed that this blood had been absorbed into the life and substance of the tree, imparting to it a kind of semi-human vitality; so that, although in outward semblance an oak, much like other oaks, it was in reality a species of oak man--an offspring, in fact, of the valiant race of Kildhurm, born of the alleged unhallowed union between Lady Kildhurm and the Red-Bearded one. Therefore its destiny was bound up with that of the Kildhurms; but whether for weal or for woe was a question as to which different people held different opinions. Some said that, since from evil no good could come, and since Lady Kildhurm had died in sin, the tree that sprang from her blood was an accursed growth instinct with a demon of violence and mischief, and sure, sooner or later, to work harm upon its human kindred. Others, on the contrary, maintained that the charge against Ursula was--in its blacker construction, at all events--a calumny; that he of the Red Beard had been a priest or a monk in disguise, and that the intrigue in which the two were concerned had for its object nothing worse than the furtherance of some religious scheme. Consequently,