In another month, during which Sir Selwyn’s health, with some fluctuations, had shown, on the whole, a disposition towards improvement, Gaston’s romance was published. On the day on which some copies were forwarded to him from the publishers, he had gone on business to the neighbouring town, and did not return until late in the evening. Sir Selwyn’s valet, an old and devoted servant who had been with his master for many years, met him at the door, pale, and terrified. “Sir Selwyn has been taken strangely ill, sir,” he said. “We can none of us tell what is the matter with him. He rang his bell an hour ago, and when I went upstairs he was looking like a ghost, sitting up quite stiff in his arm-chair, with one of your new books in his hand. It seemed like a dead man speaking when he asked how soon you could return, and said that no doctor was to be sent for. He would not let me stay with him either, and, indeed, though I’ve known Sir Selwyn these forty years, I believe I should have been almost afraid to do so sir, he looked so terrible. I remained close outside; but there’s not been a sound in his room ever since, sir.” Fears which, even in thought, he dared not shape, came like a wave upon Gaston, as he hurried to his father’s room. Death, or his image, sat there, in Sir Selwyn’s chair; or rather, the baronet’s aspect, as Gaston beheld him, grey and rigid, was like the phantom Life-in-Death; as though a corpse had been galvanised for a moment into a ghastly appearance of life. The jaw had begun to fall and the eyes were large and glassy; but the regular rising and falling of the breast showed that mechanical life was not yet extinct. Open on the ground beside Sir Selwyn lay Gaston’s new romance. The spirit had all but taken its departure; but when Gaston bent over his father and pleaded for recognition, there was a faint twitching of the brow, and a half-convulsive movement of the whole body, as though the spirit were trying to force an entrance again; and Sir Selwyn, by an effort, fixed his eyes on his son’s face. His voice struggled in his throat, and he said, with a pause between every word: “When I knelt beside him—for I still loved him—he said: ‘You have killed me, but I will never leave you, and one day I will come back from the grave and kill _you_’ He has kept his word. This is not your book, Gaston, _it-is-Udalrico’s_. This is my——” The voice stopped. Sir Selwyn was dead. The Ghost of Udalrico Verga was avenged. TIGHE HOPKINS. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL.