THE Lord of Holmcastle had left directions that his funeral should be a grand one, and that no expense should be spared. All that venal undertakers; all that red-nosed mutes, with a prevailing smell of gin and beer pervading their dingy habiliments; all that six black cart-horses, with long, waving tails and manes; all that cloaked tenants _could_ do to minister to human pride, and folly, and vile taste, _was_ done in his behalf. For him the “Family Vault,” which polluted the consecrated House of God, was opened wide, with all its foul and fusty recesses, in front of the very Altar itself; and there, amidst dead men’s bones, and oozing coffins of bursten lead, and shreds of tattered velvet, and rottenness, and all uncleanness, they left the mortal remains of the proud old Squire, in the company of obscene efts and bloated toads; while without, in the breezy churchyard, the green grass waved, and flowers blossomed, and throstles sang over the simple green graves of the village dead. Better indeed were it for the human frame to be engulphed in the great sea, there “to toss with tangle and sea shells,” than to be subjected to such degradation as this! Leaning on the friendly arm of Lucy Elthorne, Evelyn attended her father’s pompous obsequies; and when the ceremony was concluded, and the vault which never more should receive the bones of a Manwaring was shut, she returned to the now lonely house of her childhood. Very sad were her thoughts--her tenderly-loved brother buried beneath the waves of the “mournful and misty Atlantic;” her father, whom her own sweetness of disposition rather than his parental sympathy had taught her to love, consigned to the tomb; her eldest brother exposed to a thousand dangers amidst the difficulties of an ignominious campaign in South Africa! To that sole living brother she must now write and unfold the sorrows which had befallen their house, and until his return she must nerve herself to discharge the new duties which would now devolve upon her as his representative. Little did the lonely girl know that the cup of her many sorrows was not yet full to the brim! Yet so it was. A letter arrived from Lionel, written in high spirits, to tell her of his promotion, and how he hoped, “when they had given those black fellows their final thrashing, he would get leave of absence, and come home to dear old Holmcastle and his little pet sister.” Then followed a long and dreary interval without any letter at all, and then the _Gazette_ announced that the gallant Captain Manwaring, while with a few soldiers making a desperate resistance against overwhelming odds, had fallen in the fight, pierced by almost innumerable assegais. The General in command added that no more brave, promising, and valuable officer could be found in the British army, and that, had he survived, it had been his intention to recommend him for further honours.