"You look very serious," said Katie; and then she added, hurriedly, "And I want very much to speak to you, Lord Erradeen. I want you to tell me--who was that gentleman at Kinloch Houran? I have never been able to get him out of my mind. Is he paying you a visit? What is his name? Has he been in this country before? But oh, to be sure, he must have been, for he knew everything about the castle. I want to know, Lord Erradeen----" "After you have heard what I have got to say----" "No, not after--before. I tremble when I think of him. It is ridiculous, I know; but I never had any such sensation before. I should think he must be a mesmerist, or something of that sort," Katie said, with a pale and nervous smile; "though I don't believe in mesmerism," she added, quickly. "You believe in nothing of the kind--is it not so? You put no faith in the stories about my family, in the influence of the past on the present, in the despotism--But why say anything on that subject. You laugh." "I believe in superstition," said Katie somewhat tremulously, "and that it impresses the imagination, and puts you in a condition to believe--things. And then there is a pride in having anything of the sort connected with one's own family," she said recovering herself. "If it was our ghost I should believe in it too." "Ghost--is not a word that means much?" Walter said. And then there was a pause. It seemed to him that his lips were sealed, and that he had no longer command of the ordinary words. He had known what he had meant to say when he came, but the power seemed to have gone from him. He stood and looked out upon the wide atmosphere, and the freedom of the hills, with a blank in his mind, and that sense that nothing is any longer of importance or meaning which comes to those who are baffled in their purpose at the outset. It was Katie who with a certain sarcasm in her tone recalled him to himself. "You came--because you had something serious to say to me, Lord Erradeen." She was aware of what he intended to say; but his sudden pause at the very beginning had raised the mocking spirit in Katie. She was ready to defy and provoke, and silence with ridicule, the man whom she had no objection to accept as her husband--provided he found his voice. "It is true--I had something very serious to say. I came to ask you whether you could--" All this time he was not so much as looking at her; his eyes were fixed dreamily and rather sadly upon the landscape, which somehow seemed so much more important than the speck of small humanity which he ought to have been addressing. But at this point Walter recollected himself, and came in as it were from the big, silent, observing world, to Katie, sitting expectant, divided between mockery and excitement, with a flush on her cheeks, but a contraction of her brows, and an angry yet smiling mischief in her eyes.