“The Grey Monk!” ejaculated her ladyship in a whisper, touched for once with unaccustomed awe. Sir Gilbert bowed his head in grave assent. CHAPTER XLII. SIR GILBERT’S THEORY Lady Pell sat looking at her kinsman for a little while in silence, waiting for him to resume his narrative, and it was not till she perceived that he had become oblivious of her presence and was on the point of lapsing into one of his brown studies, that she spoke. “And what happened after that, cousin?” she asked, “that is to say, after you discovered that you had been brought indoors by the Grey Monk?” Sir Gilbert, who came to himself with a little start when she began to speak, said: “I have no distinct consciousness of anything that followed till I found Trant standing over me, looking half scared out of his wits, and can only suppose that I must have fainted again. But that, although only for a space of two or three seconds, my eyes beheld a robed and cowled figure, I am as positive as that they behold you at this moment. That it was no hallucination, no piece of visual cheatery, I am firmly convinced.” Some people, in Lady Pell’s place, might have said to Sir Gilbert: “Yet, when others professed to have seen the Grey Monk, you treated their assertions with contempt, and would have it that they were the victims of a self-created illusion.” But Lady Pell was too wise to venture any such observation. What she said was: “If you have told me this, cousin, with any idea that I might perhaps be able to furnish you with even a hint of some clue to the mystery, I must at once confess that your expectation has been wholly in vain. You yourself cannot possibly be more puzzled than I am.” “I hardly expected to hear you say otherwise,” he remarked with a half sigh; and with that he again subsided into silence. Lady Pell resumed her knitting, only to let her hands fall idle again at the end of a couple of minutes, while wholly unaware that she had done so. Nothing was heard save the monotonous ticking of the clock on the chimney-piece and the hissing and sputtering of the half-burnt logs on the hearth. “Louisa,” spoke the Baronet suddenly in a voice which brought her ladyship back with a start from the land of visions in which she had been mentally wandering—“Louisa, for the last hour or more a very singular idea has intruded itself persistently upon me; it is one which I have striven in vain to get rid of; indeed, so strongly does it hold me that it has almost assumed the proportions of an absolute conviction. It is—that if the cowl of the Grey Monk, who for weeks past has, so to speak, haunted the Chase, could be plucked back, there would stand revealed the features of none other than my eldest-born—my son so long believed to be dead—my hardly dealt-by Alec!” “Goodness gracious! Cousin Gilbert, whatever made you get that notion into your head?” Lady Pell was staring at him as if she already detected symptoms of brain disease.