At ten o’clock that night, when the quiet little town lay already asleep, and the bats were flying in the moonlight about the ragged walls of Carstow Castle, Rees crept out of his home like a guilty creature, and ran along the quiet roads and lanes with a fast-beating heart, until he stopped under the old portcullis, and leaned, panting for breath, against the massive oak door, which, studded with huge nails, and held together by thick bars of rusty iron, had stood the test of centuries of hard usage, and still kept intruders out of the ruin as it had kept them out of the castle in the time of its strength and its prime. What were the secrets it held within its keeping? Was there indeed gold, in handfuls, in sackfuls, buried behind its jealous barrier? Rees Pennant’s brain was growing heated under the spell which the glittering fancy cast upon him. With stealthy feet he soon was pacing underneath the walls, as Amos Goodhare had done the winter and the summer long, now caressing the rugged old stones, now tearing away the ivy which covered them, maddened by that idea of hidden treasure to be had for the finding, which has played havoc with the reason of stronger men. He saw no one on his stealthy walk. But he was not unseen. At the angle of the ancient wall, Amos Goodhare, to whom this nightly prowling was now an accustomed thing, suddenly caught sight of this new searcher in the darkness. He drew back hastily into the shadow of the trees, where his eyes seemed to blaze luridly out of the surrounding blackness as he laughed to himself silently. “Caught, caught, my little fly,” he thought, with the nod of a triumphant fiend. “There we are--a step nearer to my gold, _my_ gold!” Rees came on, and passed him, feeling the old walls with feverish hands, and unluckily not seeing Amos, nor the expression with which his friend and mentor gloated over his boyish eagerness. So, turning his back reluctantly to the castle and its grim grey towers, Rees crept, in a fever of longing and high excitement, back to his home. CHAPTER VI. Mrs. Pennant was a woman of some strength of character, which had never before come out so vividly as it did on the occasion of her husband’s death. She spent very little time in weeping over his loss. She was one of those women in whom the instincts of maternal affection are much stronger than the marital; and in truth her patience had been so hardly tried by Captain Pennant’s almost imbecile mismanagement of his affairs and the necessity of controlling her exasperation into the outer aspect of submissive respect, that there was a touch of relief even in her sorrow.