Walter looked at the curate. An impulse, a sudden instinct, seemed to attract them involuntarily to the spot whence that sound arose; they quickened their pace, they made their way through the throng. A deep chest, that had been violently forced, stood before them; its contents had been dragged to day, and now lay on the sward--a bleached and mouldering skeleton! Several of the bones were loose, and detached from the body. A general hubbub of voices from the spectators,--inquiry, guess, fear, wonder,--rang confusedly around. "Yes!" said one old man, with gray hair, leaning on a pickaxe, "it is now about fourteen years since the Jew pedlar disappeared. These are probably his bones,--he was supposed to have been murdered!" "Nay!" screeched a woman, drawing back a child who, all unalarmed, was about to touch the ghastly relics, "nay, the pedlar was heard of afterwards. I'll tell ye, ye may be sure these are the bones of Clarke, --Daniel Clarke,--whom the country was so stirred about when we were young!" "Right, dame, right! It is Clarke's skeleton," was the simultaneous cry. And Walter, pressing forward, stood over the bones, and waved his hand as to guard them from further insult. His sudden appearance, his tall stature, his wild gesture, the horror, the paleness, the grief of his countenance, struck and appalled all present. He remained speechless, and a sudden silence succeeded the late clamor. "And what do you here, fools?" said a voice, abruptly. The spectators turned: a new comer had been added to the throng,--it was Richard Houseman. His dress loose and disarranged, his flushed cheeks and rolling eyes, betrayed the source of consolation to which he had flown from his domestic affliction. "What do ye here?" said he, reeling forward. "Ha! human bones? And whose may they be, think ye?" "They are Clarke's!" said the woman, who had first given rise to that supposition. "Yes, we think they are Daniel Clarke's,--he who disappeared some years ago!" cried two or three voices in concert. "Clarke's?" repeated Houseman, stooping down and picking up a thigh-bone, which lay at a little distance from the rest; "Clarke's? Ha! ha! they are no more Clarke's than mine!" "Behold!" shouted Walter, in a voice that rang from cliff to plain; and springing forward, he seized Houseman with a giant's grasp,--"behold the murderer!" As if the avenging voice of Heaven had spoken, a thrilling, an electric conviction darted through the crowd. Each of the elder spectators remembered at once the person of Houseman, and the suspicion that had attached to his name. "Seize him! seize him!" burst forth from twenty voices. "Houseman is the murderer!" "Murderer!" faltered Houseman, trembling in the iron hands of Walter,-- "murderer of whom? I tell ye these are not Clarke's bones!" "Where then do they lie?" cried his arrester.