It must have been, she said to herself, some peculiar arrangement of light and shadow--some shadow formed in the starlight and thrown on the grass; for often as she heard of that Dog of Doom--the Spectre Hound of Essilmont--she always shrank from believing in its existence, but her heart was filled with vague and undefinable apprehension nevertheless. There was a step on the gravel, a figure appeared in the shade of the star-lighted avenue, and in another moment she was sobbing heavily in Bevil's arms. Her excessive agitation he attributed, naturally, to the very unpleasant scene of the forenoon, especially when she said, 'Oh! Bevil, how, or in what terms, am I to apologise to you for the mode in which papa treated you to-day?' 'Poor old gentleman, I can pardon all his petulance, but it fills me with a fear that he designs you to be the wife of another. Curse upon this poverty of mine, which mars as yet the life of us both, Alison. I have done wrong in loving you and winning you without your father's permission; but he never would have accorded it.' 'Oh!' moaned Alison, with her cheek on his breast; 'something is about to happen--something terrible about to befall us!' 'Something, darling--what?' 'Death, or a calamity little short of it, perhaps.' 'I do not understand you,' said Bevil, caressing her with great tenderness, and becoming very anxious on finding how faint her voice was, and how excessively she was trembling. 'Dearest Alison, the night air is chill, I am selfish and barbarous in keeping you here.' 'Don't say so, my love,' murmured the girl, as she nestled close to him, 'for something is about to happen, and heaven knows only when I may meet you again.' 'What fills you so with apprehension?' And now, with pale and trembling lips, while reclining in Goring's arms, she told him the family legend, at which he--a man of the period--a young officer within a mile or so of his lines at Aldershot, felt inclined to laugh very heartily, but for Alison's intense dejection, and the doubts and fears incident to their mutual position. 'Dearest Alison,' said he, smiling, 'you have one _bête noire_ assuredly--old Cadbury--don't, for heaven's sake, manufacture and adopt another.' 'Bevil, don't jest with me,' she said, imploringly. 'I do not jest with you, sweet one; but tell me all about this devilish hound--for such it must be, of course.'