A mounted footman, who approached him at full speed, pulled up for a moment and respectfully touched his hat, for he was one of the Lamorna household. "What is the matter?" asked Richard. "Oh, sir--oh, Mr. Richard--my lord is taken very ill." "Ill--my uncle?" "He is quite senseless, and Mr. Downie Trevelyan has sent me for the doctor." "Then ride on and lose no time," replied Richard, as he hastened to the house, where he found confusion and dismay predominant, the servants hovering in the vestibule, conversing in whispers and listening at the library door, while Jasper Funnel and Mrs. Duntreath, the old housekeeper (a lineal descendant of the Dolly Duntreath, so well-known in Cornwall), were mingling their sighs and regrets for the loss of so good a master. "Where is my uncle?" asked Richard, impetuously. "In the lib--lib--library," sobbed the housekeeper, with her black silk apron at her eyes, and as Richard advanced, Jasper Funnel softly opened the door. The favourite nephew entered the long spacious and splendid apartment, which occupied nearly the entire length of one of the wings of Rhoscadzhel, its shelves of dark wainscot filled by books in rare and magnificent bindings, with white marble busts of the great and learned men of classical antiquity looking calmly down on what was passing below. The fire-place wras deep and old; but a seacoal fire was burning cheerily in the bright steel modern grate; and as if he was in a dream, seeing the far stretching lawn, with its tufts of waving fern and stately lines of elm and oak, as he passed the tall windows noiselessly on the soft Turkey carpet, Richard drew hastily near the great arm-chair, in which his uncle was seated, dead--stone-dead, with Downie, somewhat pale and disordered in aspect, bending over him! The old man had suddenly passed away--disease of the heart, as it proved eventually, had assailed him while seated at his writing-table. On Richard's entrance and approach, Downie hurriedly took from the table and thrust into his pocket, a document which looked most legally and suspiciously like a "last will and testament;" but quick though the action, Richard could perceive that the document, whatever it was, had no signatures of any kind. Richard knelt by his uncle's side; he felt his pulses; they had ceased to beat; his heart was cold and still, and there came no sign of breath upon the polished surface of the mirror he held before the fallen jaw; with something of remorse Richard thought,-- "No later than this morning I deceived him--and he loved me so--was ever my friend and second father!--I thought," he added aloud, to Downie, "that his eyes wore an unusual expression this morning--a weird, keen, farseeing kind of look, such as I never read in them before."