When Luigi—glad enough, one may be sure, to get away—had crept out of the room with the air of a whipt cur, Sir Gilbert turned to Lisle. “You must get through your work without me this morning. I need scarcely tell you that I am very much put about by this business. Preserve the notes you have taken, and when you have an hour to spare you may write them out for me. Perhaps I may never need them, but one cannot tell. Come, Louisa.” They went no farther than the morning-room. Lady Pell could not help seeing how shaken Sir Gilbert was, and at her persuasion he drank a glass of sherry. “The shocking disclosures of this morning,” he began after a few minutes given to silent cogitation, “require, as it seems to me, to be considered from two very opposite points of view. On the one hand, there is the audacious palming off upon me of a supposititious grandson and all the side issues resulting therefrom—as to which I shall have something to say later on. On the other hand, there is this mysterious affair of the Grey Monk, to whose most opportune interference we seem to owe it that Captain Verinder’s vile scheme has suffered such a signal collapse. Now there cannot, I think, be the slightest doubt that, let the origin of the previous appearances have been what it may, there was nothing in the least degree supernatural about last night’s manifestation. That it was a being of flesh and blood as much as you or I, to my mind admits of no question.” “There I agree with you, Gilbert,” remarked Lady Pell. “It was no ghost that locked up Luigi Rispani in the strong room.” “And it was no ghostly hand that wrote the letter which has served so completely to unseal my eyes.” “But who can this mysterious personage be, and where can he have sprung from?” “And whence and from whom did he obtain the information embodied in his letter to me, which we now know to be absolutely true. Those are questions, Louisa, which there seems little present probability of either you or I being able to answer.” “At any rate,” said Lady Pell with a shrug, “it’s far from pleasant to know that, after everybody is in bed, the house is perambulated by someone who, to answer some purpose of his own, chooses to disguise himself as the family spectre. What becomes of him in the daytime? Who supplies him with food? He would seem to be able to come and go just as he likes, because he has mostly been seen out of doors in one part of the grounds or another.” Sir Gilbert shook his head. “Mysteries all; more than that we cannot say. But stranger than all to me is the fact that, whoever he may be, he should have a knowledge of certain circumstances in the life of my son which only someone intimately acquainted with him during his brief American career would be at all likely to have. But from beginning to end the affair is altogether beyond my comprehension.” “The allegations conveyed in the letter affect Mrs. Clare most seriously.”