On this hot day, which really seemed too hot for work, Mrs. Bent was stealing a few moments' idleness on the bench outside her window. John had been sitting there all the morning. The landlady was making free comments, after her wont, upon the doings, good and bad, of her neighbours; John gave an answering remark now and again, but she did not seem to wait for it. There is not much to tell the reader of this short space of time that has elapsed without record. No very striking event had taken place in it; Greylands was much in the same condition as when we parted from it last. Poor Miss Hallet had been ill for some weeks, possibly the result of the fright, and was quite unable to look personally after the vagaries of Miss Jane: the Friar's Keep and its mysteries remained where they had been; Sister Mildred was ill again, and Mary Ursula had not plucked up courage since to penetrate anew the secret passage. Squire Dobie, red-hot at first to unravel the mystery of the disappearance of Basil's son, had finally given up the inquiry as hopeless; neither had Madame Guise advanced one jot in her discoveries touching the suspected iniquity of the Master of Greylands. "Here comes the two-horse van," remarked Mrs. Bent. The two-horse van drew up before the bench and close to Mr. and Mrs. Bent. Its way did not lie by that of the ordinary coach road, but straight on up the hill past the Nunnery. Whether it had parcels or passengers to descend, or whether it had not, it always halted at the Dolphin, to "give the horses a minute's breathing," as the driver said: and to give himself a minute's gossip with the landlord and landlady. The gossip to-day lay chiefly on the score of the unusual heat, and on some refractory wheel of the van, which had persisted the previous day in dropping its spokes out. And the driver had mounted to his seat again, and the van was rattling off, before Mr. and Mrs. Bent remarked that the gentlemanly-looking man in the straw hat, who had got down, as they supposed, merely to stretch his legs, had not gone on with it. He was standing with his back to them to look about him. At the pile of buildings rising on his left, the Grey Nunnery; at the cliff towards the right, with its nestling houses; at the dark-blue sea opposite, lying calm and lovely under its stagnant fishing boats. A long, lingering look of admiration at the latter, and he turned round to Mr. and Mrs. Bent, standing by the bench now, but not sitting, and lifted his straw bat as he addressed them. "I beg your pardon. This seems to be a very nice place. What an expanse of sea!" "It's a very nice place indeed--for its size, sir," said John. "And you'd not get a better sea than that anywhere." "The place is called Greylands, I am told." "Yes, sir: Greylands."