"Look around you." They were in the gateway leading to the courtyard, with their faces turned towards the slope of the hill. "Look around you. I have shorn the land close for my child. I work night and day for her, as though her daily bread depended on my arms and my brain. I may die any time. I have no friend, no relative. I am alone with my child. Everyone seems against me. That greedy, rapacious young scoundrel who is to follow me is looking with hungry eyes upon Warfinger Island, and nightly praying for my death. All my old friends have given me up. I am not of them now, because I have striven to make provision for my child. They call me a sordid miser, a stain upon the order I share with them. Let them rave. I will do what I think right by my child. Let them do as they choose. I do not ask their help. I only ask them to let me alone. But you I ask to help me; and you will, for you are not ennobled by the accident of your birth, but by the generosity of your nature." If any power of wavering had remained in young Grey, this appeal would have overcome it. So the matter was finally settled: the son was to act for the baronet precisely as the father had acted before. During the year 1856 Mr. Grey the younger was a frequent visitor to Island Castle. He liked boating; and often in the fine evenings pulled down the river Weeslade to the Island, had a consultation with Sir Alexander, and then pulled back to Daneford in the sweet fresh twilight. Often when it was growing dusk, and he was about to start from the Island for the city, he pushed off his boat into mid-stream, and rested on his oars, looking up at the mouldering Castle standing out clear against the darkening sky. There was something desolate and forlorn about that vast pile, inhabited by that ageing man and that young girl. In front, facing the wider water-passage, it stood high above him, its blind gateway looking down upon him, a lonely round tower at the right of the archway catching the strange gleams of light reflected from the Weeslade as the river glided silently towards the sea. Winter and summer, when there was sunshine at sunset, the top of that tower caught the reflection of the last red streak that flickered on the polished surface of the river. This fact affected long ago the superstitious feelings of the people. There was a tradition in the neighbourhood that in times gone by the wicked mother of a Lord Stancroft used abominable witchcraft against her daughter-in-law, her son's bride, newly brought home from the kingdom of Spain, a country far away, and near the sun, and full of gallant men and fine ladies, whose eyes it were a marvellous fine feast to see, but who were--the ladies--treacherous and light of love.