The gray-headed speaker turned away, and left me alone to gaze on the mansion he had thus banned. I had heard the same when I was a child; the nurse had been chidden for talking of it in my presence, and my own questions on the subject had always been evaded. Strange that now, after thirty years' sojourning in a far-off land, I should come back to hear the same mystery alluded to, the same destiny foretold! The impressions were more than half effaced; but now, like the colors of a picture brought to light after long obscurity, they returned vividly to my mind. I gazed on the mansion; it was the only thing in the village of my birth that I found greatly changed; but in looking at this once stately Tudor hall I was reminded painfully how long I had been absent. When I last saw it, the sunshine had glowed upon the gables and mullions of a goodly mansion; the clear starlight now only showed a moss-grown ruin. The balustrades and urns were cracked and thrown down; there were no peacocks on the sloping lawn, and its once trim grass was overgrown with nettles and coltsfoot. The quaint-patterned beds of the garden, too, had lost the shapes of diamonds and stars, and, no longer glittering with flowers, were scarcely to be distinguished from the walks save by more luxuriant crops of weeds. The roof of the private chapel had recently fallen in, and little remained of the building but an exquisitely-sculptured window, amidst the tracery of which the wall-flower and the ivy had long taken the place of the herald's blazon. The shadow of all this ruined beauty was on my spirit; so being just in the humor for a ghostly legend, I determined, on my return, to ask my friend L., with whom I was spending a few days, for an explanation of the mystery. Thus much was readily told. Briarhurst had been suffered to fall into decay ever since old Sir Lambert's death; another branch of the family had become the possessors; and as no tenant staid there, the present owner intended very shortly to have it pulled down. "Well, but what is the difficulty of living there?" said I. "It is quite possible, with the aid of a yearly run up to town in the season, and plenty of books, to exist even in that 'lonesome lodge' without hanging one's self. Do any lords spiritual interfere with one's repose?" "Ring for Edward and Hetty, my dear," said L. to his wife. Then, turning to me, "Please don't allude to that subject before the children, or we shall have them both afraid to stir after dark." My curiosity was balked again; so, after a more constrained evening than we had yet passed, I wished the family good night. My friend followed me out of the room. "Look at that picture for five minutes, while I fetch something," said he, pointing to a portrait, evidently just rescued from damp and destruction, that leant against the wall.