"Well I never!--this beats everything. Was he not worn away to a skeleton before he went?--had he not heart disease?--did he not die of effusion on the brain?" ran on the Squire, in a maze of bewilderment. "He was thin certainly: patients in asylums generally are; but he could not be called a skeleton; I never knew that he had heart disease. As to dying, he most assuredly did not die here." "I do think I must be lost," cried the Squire. "I can't find any way out of this. Can you let me see Mr. Pitt, your head assistant, doctor? Perhaps he can throw some light on it. It was Pitt who wrote the letter to Mr. Radcliffe." "You should see him with pleasure if he were still with me," replied the doctor. "But he has left." "And Frank did not die here!" commented the Squire. "What can be the meaning of it?" The meaning was evidently not to be found there. Dr. Dale said he could tell us no more than he had told, if he talked till night--that Francis Radcliffe was taken out by his brother. Stephen paid all charges at the time, and they went away together. "And of course, Johnny, he is to be believed," quoth the pater, turning himself round and round on the grass-plot, as we were going away, like a teetotum. "Dale would not deceive us: he could have no object in doing that. What in the world does it all mean?--and where _is_ Francis? Ste Radcliffe can't have shipped him off to Canada with the wheelbarrows!" How the Squire whirled straight off to the train, finding one on the point of starting, and got down home again, there's no space to tell of. It was between eight and nine, as the station clock told him, but he was in too much excitement to let the matter rest. "Come along, Johnny. I'll have it out with Stephen before I sleep." And they had it out in that same gloomy parlour at the Torr, where Tod and I had been a night or two before; frightfully gloomy to-night, for the dusk was drawing on, and hardly a bit of light came in. The Squire and Stephen, sitting opposite each other, could not see the outline of one another's faces. Ste brazened it out. "You're making a hullabaloo for nothing," said he, doggedly. "No, it's true he didn't die at the mad-house; he died within a week of coming out of it. Why didn't I tell the truth about it? Why, because I knew I should get a heap o' blame thrown back at me for taking him out--and I wished I hadn't took him out; but 'twas no good wishing then. How was I to know that the very self-same hour he'd got his liberty, he would begin drinking again?--and drink himself into a furious fever, and die of it? Could I bring him to life again, do you suppose?" "What was the meaning of that letter you brought to me, purporting to come from Dr. Dale? Answer that, Stephen Radcliffe."