A good deal went on that was not for the good of any of the lads, and at last came a great crash, the particulars of which no one except those actually involved ever knew. There was an old house near Ashcroft Hall called Ravenshurst, which had the reputation of being haunted. It belonged to a Mr and Mrs Fletcher, who came there occasionally with their one daughter and entertained the neighbourhood. At last, on the occasion of a great ball, there was an alarm of the Ravenshurst ghost, a pursuit, and, it was said, a discovery that Alwyn Cunningham, assisted by Harry Whittaker, had played a trick. The affair was hushed up, and no one ever knew exactly what had happened; but a little girl had been frightened into serious illness, and at the same time some valuable jewels belonging to Mrs Fletcher had disappeared. All that was known to the Ashcroft public was that Harry Whittaker was brought before Mr Cunningham and other magistrates the next morning on the charge of having stolen the jewels, but that the case was dismissed from absolute want of evidence, and also on Alwyn Cunningham declaring on oath that Harry Whittaker had never been near the place from which the jewels had disappeared. Ned Warren was out of the scrape, having been with his father all night. All that he could or would say of the matter was that he had told Harry that "it wasn't their place to frighten the gentlefolk, whatever Mr Alwyn might say," and had so kept out of the affair. But the lost jewels were never found, and the exact mode of their disappearance was never clearly known outside the families of those concerned, and the magistrates who had refused to commit Harry Whittaker. But after that interview neither Alwyn Cunningham nor Harry Whittaker had ever been seen in Ashcroft again. It was known that the young gentleman and his father had had a desperate quarrel, and that Mr Cunningham never intended to forgive him. In spite of Alwyn's oath and the magistrates' decision, the loss of the jewels hung over the memory of the two foolish youths with a cloud of suspicion. Most of the Ashcroft people thought that young Whittaker had stolen them, and had been screened by Alwyn Cunningham. Mr Fletcher, the owner of the jewels, soon after died, and the family in the natural course of things left Ravenshurst at the end of their tenancy. Whether Edgar Cunningham had had any share in the practical joke or knew anything of the fate of its authors no one could tell, for shortly after his health had failed from an unexplained accident in which his spine had been injured, and he had been an invalid ever since. Since those events Ashcroft Hall had been a very dull and dreary place.