And then Davies made a strange imperious gesture, and I must needs listen to her talk. I have since pieced it together out of her odd enigmatic sentences. My late brother-in-law, after years of passive connivance in _their_ doings, which paid for his debaucheries in foreign lands, became restive, or was suspected by his uncles, and condemned by them to death as a danger to their evil association. Sir Thomas was decoyed home, and, according to their habit in case of mutiny, taken out, a prisoner, to the deepest part of the channel, and drowned. The report was spread that he had been killed in a drunken brawl at Bristol, a show of legal proceedings was instituted by his uncle in that city (naturally to no effect, there being no murderer there to discover), and a corpse brought back by them for solemn burial at St. Salvat's. But instead of being interred in the family vault, the body of the false Sir Thomas was destroyed by the burning of the Chapel during his wake. The suspicions of Mrs. Davies appeared to have been awakened by this fact, and by the additional one that she was not allowed to see the corpse of her beloved foster-son. Her own son Hugh, Sir Thomas's foster brother, disappeared about this time; and Hubert appears to have made the distracted mother believe that her own boy was the murderer of Sir Thomas, and had met with death at his hands; the whole unlikely story being further garnished for the poor credulous woman with a doubt that the murder of her foster-son had been, in some manner, the result of a conspiracy to bring about the succession of my husband. All this she seems to have believed at the time of our coming, and for this reason to have lent herself most willingly to spy upon my husband and me, in hopes of getting the proofs of his guilt. But her suspicions gradually changed, and her whole attitude in the matter was utterly reversed when, a few days before the wreck of the great Indiaman and my adventure on the sea-wall, her son, whom she believed dead, had stolen back in disguise and told her of an expedition in which the uncles had carried a man to the high seas, gagged and bound, and drowned him: a man who was not one of their crew and whose stature and the colour of whose hair answered to those of the nominal master of St. Salvat's. Her son, in an altercation over some booty, had let out his suspicion to my uncles, and had escaped death only by timely flight masked under accidental drowning from a fishing boat. Since this revelation Davies's devotion to the dead Sir Thomas had transferred itself to Eustace and me, and her one thought had become revenge against the men who had killed her darling. Davies told me all this, as I said, in short, enigmatic sentences; and I scarcely know whether her tale seemed to me more inevitably true or more utterly false in its hideous complication of unlikely horrors. When she had done: