"I'll be shot if I tell you. John Bent? No, that it was not: John Bent seems as prudent as the rest of them. Look here, James Castlemaine: if an impression exists against you, you must not blame people, but circumstances. Look at the facts. Young Anthony comes over to claim his property which you hold, believing it to be his. You tell him it is not his, that it is yours; but you simply tell him this; you do not, in spite of his earnest request, prove it to him. There's bad blood between you: at any rate, there is on your side; and you have an open encounter in a field, where you abuse him and try to strike him. That same night he and John Bent, being abroad together, see you cross the road from this Chapel Lane, that leads direct from your house, you know, and enter the Friar's Keep; young Anthony runs over in your wake, and enters it also: and from that blessed moment he is never seen by mortal eyes again. People outside hear a shot and a scream--and that's all. Look dispassionately at the circumstances for yourself, and see if they do not afford grounds for suspicion." "If all the facts were true--yes. The most essential link in them is without foundation--that it was I who went into the Friar's Keep. Let me put a question to you--what object can you possibly suppose I should have in quitting my house at midnight to pay a visit to that ghostly place?" "I don't know. It puzzles everybody." "If John Bent is really correct in his assertions, that some one did cross from the lane to the Friar's Keep, I can only assume it to have been a stranger. No inhabitant of Greylands, as I believe and now assure you Squire Dobie, would voluntarily enter that place in the middle of the night. It has an ill reputation for superstition: all kinds of ghostly fancies attach to it. I should about as soon think of quitting my house at night to pay a visit to the moon as to the Friar's Keep." Squire Dobie sat in thought. All this was more than plausible; difficult to discredit. He began to wonder whether he had not been hard upon James Castlemaine. "What is your opinion upon the disappearance?" he asked. "You must have formed one." Mr. Castlemaine lifted his dark eyebrows. "I can't form one," he said. "Sometimes I have thought Anthony must have attempted to run down the rocks by the uncertain path from the chapel ruins, and have perished in the sea; at others I think he may have left Greylands voluntarily that night, and will some day or other reappear again as unexpectedly. His father Basil was given to these impromptu flights, you know." "But this is all supposition?" "Undoubtedly it is. Who was it, then, they watched into the Keep, you ask?--that is the least-to-be-accounted-for statement of all. My opinion is that no one entered it; that John Bent's eyesight deceived him." "And now one more question, James," resumed the Squire, insensibly returning to the more familiar appellation of former days: "is Greylands' Rest yours, or was it left to Basil?"