A numb feeling began to creep over Grey. He felt like one walking in a bad dream. The blow of hearing of his father’s death was a heavy one. It seemed to shake the foundations of his life to their very base. And now his home was lost to him! Little as he understood the machinations of his kinsman, he grasped that he had come into nothing but a barren title and nominal possession of a ruinous and dilapidated old house, the revenues of which were in some way alienated to another. He had heard such tales before. He did not discredit old Jock’s recital. It fitted in only too well with what he knew of his father’s recklessness and selfish expenditure, and his kinsman’s artful grasping policy. So, after all, he had come to a home that was not his; and he would have to face the world again as something very like a beggar. Old Jock’s hand upon his arm aroused him to a sense of outward things. Dicon had come up, and was listening with wide eyes and falling jaw to the recital of the same story as had been told in outline to Grey. The fuller details only made it sound more true and lifelike. "Come in, Sir Grey, come in. There’s bite and sup for you in the cupboard. The old master didn’t forget me, and I can make shift to earn my bread by hook or by crook even without regular wage. Come in, come in, and I’ll give ye what I’ve got for ye. ’Twas all the old master had left from his hoard; but he said it would give you a start in life, and that your wits must do the rest. He gave it me private like, when Mr. Barty was off the place, and I buried it beneath the hearthstone that same day. ’Tis all safe for you, Sir Grey; and you won’t go penniless into the world, for all that this villain of a kinsman reigns at Hartsbourne, where you should be." *CHAPTER III.* *THE SCHEMING KINSMAN.* They sat face to face in a room which Grey well remembered. It had been lined with folios in those days—great tomes in which he had dug with breathless delight, for the treasures of wood-cuts and the strange stories they possessed—and illuminated missals, where, amid a mass of gilding and wonderful colours, the story of saint or martyr could be traced. Other and more modern works had been also there, specimens of the art of printing as carried on through the days of the Stuarts. But where were all these tomes and scrolls and books now? Grey swept the empty shelves with quick, indignant glances. A motion of his hands seemed to ask the question his lips were too proud to speak.