Wend back with me, dear reader, into that distant part of the country where this tale first began; not exactly, indeed, to the same scene, but to a spot about three or four miles from Morley Court, which you have already heard of, under the name of Yelverly. The aspect of that place, and of the whole country round it, was so peculiar, that I should have wished to pause, and give some description of the house and grounds, even if I had not been impelled to do so by the necessity of the case. But there are things to come, which may render it requisite that the reader's eye should be able to call up, like a magistrate, each individual part of the scene before it, and examine it strictly as a witness in regard to the events that are taking place. Oh, those silent witnesses!--those trees, those shrubs, those fields! those dark panels of the old oak chamber! those carved figures and antique busts of ancient heroes!--oh, those silent witnesses in every old domain! Could we but endow them with a voice, what tales might they tell of merry or sad scenes in the long past; of secret sins, and horrible treacheries; of human absurdity, folly, and vice; of crime, of agony, and of despair! How might they, with their quaint old legends, make the lips laugh, the bosom heave, and the eyes overflow! The house of Yelverly was a curious old stone structure, of firm and solid masonry, on which few repairs had taken place, for few had been necessary, but which had been subjected to several alterations, as was evinced by apertures blocked up here and there, and by the lines of different coloured stone-work, which indicated that the tops of the windows, which were now square, had once displayed pointed, or Tudor arches. What the building had originally been I do not know, probably some dependence of a monastery or abbey, in the neighbourhood. It had never been large, though it now formed a roomy and convenient house for a small family. But, notwithstanding its antiquity, and the picturesque taste of the architects of the age in which it was built, it had not one single pretension to beauty of any kind; sort, or description whatsoever. It was grey, and cold, and flat, with the windows apparently scattered over the face of it by accident, each having been put in, beyond all doubt, wherever it was found convenient; here, to light one room--there, to light another; at one point to clear up the obscurity of a staircase--at a second, to let the sun shine into a passage. As if to disfigure the front more completely, a penthouse had been thrown out from one side, at the height or about ten feet from the ground, covering an eighth part the building, and rendering the rooms thus sheltered dull and sunless enough. The principal door would have been as ugly as the rest of the house, had it not possessed an old-fashioned stone porch, with a seat on either side, which, by no means beautiful in itself, yet relieved the eye, in some degree, by breaking the flatness of the building.