While the people over whom Miles Challoner had come to reign in the course of nature thus curiously, but not unkindly or with any lack of feeling, discussed the actualities and the probabilities of his life, and raked up the memory of that mysterious family secret, strongly suspected to be of a calamitous nature, which had long been hidden by the impenetrable silence of the Squire, and now lay buried in his grave, Miles Challoner himself was much occupied with the selfsame subject. The unanswered question which he had asked his father in his last moments,--the unsolved enigma which had disturbed his mind for years, which haunted him now, and made all his life seem unreal, wrong, and out of joint,--. rose up before him, and engaged his thoughts constantly, almost to the exclusion of every other matter for reflection except his father's death. The two linked themselves together in a strong bond of pain, and held him in their withes. This time was a very heavy one to the new master of Rowley Court. His position was irksome to him. The privileges of proprietorship had no charms for Miles Challoner. He disliked the business details in which it involved him; he shrunk from the keenly painful associations it produced; he suffered much from his loneliness,--from the loneliness of the Court generally. Hitherto, whenever he had been away, he had returned to enjoy the tranquillity--tranquillity which, when it was tasted as a change, he appreciated very highly, but which as the normal state of things wearied him rapidly and excessively. He had had much companionship, in and since his boyhood, with his father, and the blank left by the old Squire's death was indeed complete. Miles Challoner, without deserving precisely the appellation of a student, was fond of books. He was well-educated, not in a very profound, but in a tolerably extensive and various sense; and his taste took a literary turn early in life, which, wholly unshared by his father, had been encouraged, fostered, and directed by his father's friend, Lord Sandilands. Miles was a man of few intimacies. He liked society; but no one would ever have called him sociable: he had much more the air of frequenting general, in order to keep clear of particular society; and this really was the case. Upon his sensitive disposition the family secret, concerning which he had vainly questioned his father on his death-bed, weighed heavily. It set him apart, and kept him apart from anything like intimacy with young men of his own age, because he felt that they too would be always trying to find out that of which he himself was ignorant; and he was not at ease with the older people, his father's contemporaries and neighbours, because he was not sure whether they had any inkling or certain knowledge of the family secret,--whether they were all in a conspiracy to keep him in the darkness to which his father had condemned him from the period of his brother's disappearance. Would