"Well, sir, what he said was this. That were I to spend my best years and energies in the search after information, I should be no wiser at the end than I am now." "That I believe to be extremely probable," cordially assented the lawyer. "But do you see the position in which it would leave me? Years and years!--and I am not to be satisfied one way or the other?" The attorney froze again. "Ah, yes; true." "Well, sir, I will say good-day to you, for it seems that I can do no good by staying, and I must not take up your time for nothing. I only wish you had been at liberty to advise me." Mr. Knivett made some civil rejoinder about wishing that he had been. So they parted, and the young man found himself in the street again. Until now it had been one of the brightest of days; but during this short interview at the lawyer's, the weather seemed to have changed. The skies, as Anthony Castlemaine looked up, were now dull and threatening. The clouds had lowered. He buttoned his warm coat about him, and began his walk back to Greylands. "Je crois que nous aurons de la neige," he said, in the familiar language to which he was most accustomed, "et je n'ai pas de parapluie. N'importe; je marcherai vite." Walk fast! And to Greylands! Could poor Anthony Castlemaine have foreseen the black pall of Fate, already closing upon him like a dreadful shadow, he had turned his steps away from Greylands for ever. CHAPTER VII. IN THE MOONLIGHT. White clouds were passing over the face of the blue sky, casting their light and their shade on the glorious sea. Not for a minute together did the sea present the same surface; its hue, its motions, and its ripples were for ever changing. Now it would be blue and clear almost as crystal; anon, green and still; next, sparkling like diamonds under the sunlight: and each aspect seemed more beautiful than that which it had displaced. To Anthony Castlemaine, gazing at it from his bedroom at the Dolphin Inn, no object in nature had ever seemed so beautiful. Not the vineyards of his native land; not the sunny plains of Italy; not the grand picturesque mountains of Switzerland: all these he had been accustomed to from his youth, and they were fair to look upon: but to him they were as nothing, compared with this wide, wondrous, ever-changing sea. Some days, a very few, had elapsed since his visit to Stilborough, told of in the last chapter. Another week had come in, and this was the Tuesday in it: destined to be a most fatal day for more than one person connected with our story. The snow-storm he had anticipated, in his homeward walk that afternoon, had passed off without falling; the cold itself seemed on the next day to have taken its departure. With that variable caprice that distinguishes our insular climate, the biting frost, the keen east wind, that had almost cut people through, had given, place to the warm, cheering weather of a balmy spring.