The dinner was not such a dismal feast as he had imagined it would be. People are apt to accustom themselves very easily to an old friend’s removal, and the vicar and the lawyer seemed tolerably cheerful about their departed neighbour. They discussed his little eccentricities, his virtues and his foibles, in an agreeable spirit, and did ample justice to his claret, of which, however, Mr. Clare said he had never been quite so good a judge as he had believed himself to be. They sat for a couple of hours over their dessert, sipping some Burgundy of which Jasper Treverton had been especially proud, and John Treverton was the only one of the three who seemed troubled by gloomy thoughts. It was ten o’clock when Mr. Sampson proposed an adjournment to his own abode. He had sent a little note home to his sister before dinner, telling her of Mr. Treverton’s intended visit, and had ordered a fly from the inn, in which vehicle he and his guest drove to ‘The Laurels,’ a trim, bright-looking, modern house, with small rooms which were the very pink of neatness; so neat and new-looking, indeed, that John Treverton fancied they could never have been lived in, and that the furniture must have been sent home from the upholsterer that very day. Thomas Sampson was a young man, and a bachelor. He had inherited an excellent business from his father, and had done a good deal to improve it himself, having a considerable capacity for getting on in life, and an ardent love of money-making. He had one sister, who lived with him. She was tolerably good-looking, in a pale, insipid way, with eyes of a cold light blue, and straight, silky hair of a nondescript brown. This young lady, whose name was Eliza, welcomed John Treverton with much politeness. There were not many men in the neighbourhood of Hazlehurst who could have borne comparison with that splendid military-looking stranger, and Miss Sampson, who did not yet know the terms of Jasper Treverton’s will, supposed that this handsome young man was now master of the Manor and all its dependencies. For his sake she had bestowed considerable pains on the adornment of the spare bedroom, which she had embellished with more fanciful pincushions, and ring-stands and Bohemian glass scent-bottles, than are consistent with the masculine idea of comfort. For his gratification also she had ordered a reckless expenditure of coals in the keeping up of a blazing fire in the same smartly-furnished chamber, which looked unspeakably small and mean to the eyes of John Treverton after the spacious rooms at the Manor-house. ‘I know of a room that will look meaner still,’ he said to himself, ‘for this at least is clean and neat.’ He went to bed, and slept better than he had done for many nights, but his dreams were full of Laura Malcolm. He dreamt that they were being married, and that as she stood beside him at the altar her face changed in some strange, ghastly way into another face, a face he knew only too well. CHAPTER III.