How glad, the justice little thought. It seemed to Mary Anne as if this news removed the embargo she had self-imposed upon her marriage with Robert Hunter. Perhaps she had already begun to question the necessity of it--to think it a very utopian, severe decision. In the revulsion of feeling that came over her, she laid her head down on Isaac's shoulder with a burst of tears, and told him all. Isaac smiled. "You must tell him that you have relented, Mary Anne." "He will not be back for five years." "He will be back in less than five months; perhaps in five weeks." She sat upright, staring at him. "Isaac!" "He will, indeed. Anna had a letter from him yesterday. It came to Miss Jupp's, addressed to 'Miss Chester.' Business matters are bringing him home for a short while; personal things, he says, that only himself can do. I wonder if he wrote to her in the hope that the information would penetrate to Coastdown?" She sat in silence, her colour going and coming, rather shrinking from the merriment in Isaac's eye. Oh, would it be so?--would it be so? "In that case--I mean, should circumstances bring him again to the Red Court Farm--we shall have to disclose publicly the truth about Cyril, Mary Anne. As well that it should be so, and then a tombstone can be put. But it can wait yet." As she sat there, looking out on the sparkling sea, a prevision came over her that this happiness might really come to her at last, and a sobbing sigh of thankfulness went up to heaven. Coastdown went on in its ordinary quiet routine. The mysteries of the Red Court Farm were at an end, never again to be enacted. Long and perseveringly did Mr. Superintendent Kyne look out for the smugglers; many and many a night did he exercise his eyes and his patience on the edge of that bleak plateau; but they came no more. Old Mr. Thornycroft, deprived, he hardly knew how, of his sons, lived on at the Red Court, feeling at times a vacancy of pursuit: he had loved adventure, and his occupation was gone. But the land got a better chance of being tilled to perfection now than it ever had been. Meanwhile the whole neighbourhood remained under a clear and immutable persuasion that the ghost still "walked" in the churchyard. The new right of road had come to a hot dispute; but Coastdown persisted in using it after nightfall, to avoid the graves and their ominous visitor. While Captain Copp, taking his glass in the parlour at the Mermaid, did not fail to descant upon the marvels of that night, when he and that woman-servant of his, who (he would add in a parenthesis) was undaunted enough for a she-pirate, saw with their own eyes the spirit of Robert Hunter. And then the parlour would fall into a discussion of the love of roving inherent in the young Thornycrofts--Cyril lingering away still; Richard also perhaps gone to look after him; and speculate upon how long it would be before they returned, and the glorious dinners were resumed at the Red Court Farm. THE END.