Mother confided to her in return Moore's prospects. Mrs Payne was a gentle, rather childish woman, of the type whom very clever men are often credited with preferring as wives, and we soon came to the conclusion that the old saying was exemplified in the present case. The sons, the elder one in particular, were decidedly intelligent above the average, and their admiration for their father and elder brother fully equalled that of their mother. Rupert, the invalid, took a great fancy to me, and before long I was the recipient of many of his secret hopes and aspirations, the most intense of which was that he should become a novelist. "You see, Miss Fitzmaurice," he said to me one day, "I have already, and would have increasingly, material ready to my hand. You don't know what extraordinary stories lawyers come across! Many of them there is no breach of confidence in repeating, and my brother Clarence has told me bits of others quite as strange as any fiction." "Or stranger," I remarked, for at that moment Isabel's description of the Grim House and its inhabitants came into my mind. "Yes," said Rupert, "you are right. Some stories are `too strange not to be true.' And you see I could piece bits together, so that nobody could possibly recognise anything. My father knows _one_ story which he says he can't tell us--I believe he says so partly to tantalise us-- which he declares would make a first-rate sensational novel." "And will he never be able to tell it to you?" I inquired, more for the sake of seeming interested in poor Rupert's conversation than because I cared to hear. The young fellow was rather of the "old-fashioned" order; there was a certain quaintness in his way of speaking which was not without its charm, though now and then he tired my patience a little. He was so unlike anything of "boy" kind I had ever come across. "I don't know," he said gravely. "_Perhaps_, if all the people it concerns were dead. But they are none of them very old; some, I believe, still almost young." "Then you _do_ know something about it, after all," I replied, my interest increasing. "_Scarcely_ anything," said Rupert; "only this much, that it is a secret which affects a whole family, and that my father and one other are the only beings who are in their confidence. He has told Clarence and me that some day he may have to tell us--when he gets very old, or if his memory were failing. Two outsiders must know it." "And yet it affects a whole family," I repeated. "They must be a very reticent set of people." "More than that--it has darkened the life of a whole family; that, I think, was my father's exact expression," said Rupert eagerly. "I often and often think about it, and wonder what the secret can be."