He drove spurs into his horse, and, leaping forward, rushed the few score yards to the bend where the Grange would come into view. He was incredulous still: it would appear too impossible a devilry on the part of Fate to have struck this blow, and struck it coincidently with his return. Yet, even before he reached the bend, he knew that it was true--was true. The red sparkle of it, like a cluster of hellish jewels, blinked and snickered at him through the green leaves. And then the next moment he had broken into the open, and pulling up so sharply as almost to throw his horse back on its haunches, rose in his stirrups and saw. From base to attic the house was one streaming robe of flame. CHAPTER XXXII. RETRIBUTION When the crowner, with his twelve good men and true--yokels, for the most part, drawn from the neighbouring farms--came to sit on the body of Quentin Bagott, Scrivener Harnett--he who had witnessed the Will--was present, as representing the interests of the heir to the estate. Evidence as to facts being incontestable, the jury, following the plain lead of their officer--himself a friend of the attorney--gave in their verdict to the effect that the deceased had died by the visitation of God, being a very stout gentleman and suspect of Popish inclinations; which rider, however, the crowner--at Master Harnett’s instance--ruling to be irrelevant, it was omitted from the record, and the simple verdict left to stand. Melton, indeed, had every reason for desiring to suppress any linking of the dead man’s name with the recusancy associated with it, wishing it to be assumed that the intimacy between them, by which he had himself come unexpectedly to profit, had been one of pure, long-standing, social good-fellowship. The attorney, the inquest over, took particular pains, on his behalf, to convey that impression abroad, with the result that the situation, after serving for a local nine days’ wonder, came generally to be accepted, and some hopes even to be entertained that the Grange, under its new ownership, might cease to be a focus for suspicion and mystery. It seemed a hardship on the absent heir-presumptive; but, as to that, there was no telling, since all had been an enigma which passed behind those drear-shut walls; and for the rest the Law, which has made of Possession a fetish to awe the stoutest scepticism, was there to support its own most incontrovertible claims. So, all considered, it would be well, perhaps, thought popular opinion, to resign to peaceful and undisputed enjoyment of what he had gained, one, who, though a stranger, stood to his rights in the sacred name of Property.