"All his servants and friends were remembered by the dead nobleman, and almost every one that he knew was named except his own brother. The world did wonder, then, that that brother, with a singular generosity, resigned in favour of his niece many things that he might have claimed as belonging to the male heir, and treated all questions between them, in regard to property, with unexampled liberality. When he had settled all things, and retained a number of his brother's domestics, he ordered the hall at Dewry to be put in order; not loving the part of the country where his brother had been murdered. Thither, then, he went, after he had arranged his affairs in London, bringing down with him a young gentleman of seven years' old, his only son, and supposed heir to all the property." "And my mother!" cried De Vaux, raising his head from his hands, in which position he had been sitting while listening to the gipsy's story; for during its course he had been agitated by many a strange, but ill-defined, emotion. The story of his uncle's murder had always been one on which his mind had rested with awe and pain from his very childhood; but though he had heard it often told, both as a whole and in detached fragments, yet he had never listened to such minute details as were now given by an eye-witness of the horrible event, who seemed prepared to connect it, too, by some vague and unexplained link, with the painful assertions which had been made in regard to his own doubtful situation. The very expectation, or rather apprehension, of some horrible disclosure to follow at every word the gipsy uttered, had troubled and shaken him greatly; and the name of Sir William Ryder--a person who, it appeared, was then most intimate with his father, but who, it was clear, had since become the object of his most determined hatred--had added deeper feeling of mysterious dread to all those thoughts by which he was already perturbed. What could be the meaning of all this? whither would it lead? how was it to end? were the questions which continually pressed upon him as the gipsy proceeded; and it appeared even a relief, when Pharold's last words seemed to bring his ideas back from the new and dreadful topics on which they had been engaged, to the subject of his former doubts and suspicions. "And my mother!" he cried, as the gipsy paused, "what of her?" "Nothing, that I know," replied Pharold, apparently with some surprise; "nothing but that she was a Spanish lady, who married your father privately, after breaking her vows in a convent." "Then they were married?" cried De Vaux, eagerly. "Certainly!" answered the gipsy: "I never heard it doubted; though he kept her from all his family, and used her ill; which was one of the causes of his quarrels with his brother. But she was dead before he came down here to take possession of his brother's lands. But let me tell my tale."