They looked at it together as it lay in the father’s hand—a garnet, cut _en cabochon_, smoothly rounded like a blob of claret by the lapidary, clasped by thin gold claws; and the dog, with eyes askance, stood near them, wrapt in cogitations of a different world. Their heads went down upon the gem: they stared in silence, strangely influenced by its eye-like shape and sullen glow, that seemed to come less from the polished surface than from a cynic spirit inward, animate. It had the look of age: had glowed on the breasts of high-scarfed dandies, pinned the screens on girlish bosoms flat now in the dust, known the dear privacies of love and passion, lurked in the dusk of treasuries, kept itself unspotted, indifferent, unchanged through the flux of human generations. Lord! that men’s lives should be so short and the objects of their fashioning so permanent! “It may be braw, but it’s no’ very bonny,” at the last quo’ Stephen Wanlock. “I want ye,” said his father, “to take it now with—with my assurance of regard and—and gratitude to Mellish of The Peel. He has a craze for such gewgaws, with no small part of his money, they tell me, sunk in their collection. You can say it has the reputation of a charm.” Young Wanlock posted off on this pleasant mission, with a chuck below the chin for the maid in passing; and his father, walking in the afternoon between the dishevelled shrubberies of his neglected policies, felt at times amid the anguish of his situation a soothing sense of other ills averted and transferred to one whom now he hated worse than ever. * * * * * It seemed next day as if the evil genius dwelling in the jewel wrought its purpose with appalling expedition. Something is in the air of our haunted North whose beaked sea promontories cleave the wind and foam, that carries the hint of things impending to all who have boding fears or hateful speculations, and Wanlock knew some blow had fallen on his enemy while yet were no human tidings. The pyots chattered garrulous as women on the walls; the rooks that flew across the grey storm-bitten country were in clanging bands, possessed of rumours which they shared at first with the careering clouds alone, for men are the last of all created things to learn of their own disasters. He went eagerly out and came on other harbingers. A horseman galloped down the glen—“The Peel! The Peel!” he cried, as he thundered past with his head across his shoulder—“They have broken The Peel!” A running gipsy with a mountain of shining cans a-clatter on his back skulked into the wood as Wanlock came upon him, and harried forth by the dog, stood on the highway wildly protesting innocence. “Who blamed ye?” queried Wanlock. “What has happened?” “I declare to my God I know nothing of it!” cried the man in an excess of apprehension, “but The Peel, they say, was broken into through the night.”