The valet looked very grave.
"If you had said such a thing to me a fortnight ago, I should have told you it was impossible," he said; "but now—."
"Now, what do you say?"
"Well, sir, you're a gentleman, and, of course, you can keep a secret; so I'll tell you candidly that nothing my master could do would surprise me after what I've seen within the last fortnight."
This was quite enough for Victor Carrington, who did not leave Arlington Street until he had extorted from the valet the entire history of the baronet's adoption of the ballad-singer.
* * * * *
CHAPTER VI.
AULD ROBIN GRAY.
A year and some months had passed, and the midsummer sunlight shone upon the woods around Raynham Castle.
It was a grand pile of buildings, blackened by the darkening hand of time. At one end Norman towers loomed, round and grim; at another extremity the light tracery of a Gothic era was visible in window and archway, turret and tower. The centre had been rebuilt in the reign of Henry VIII, and a long range of noble Tudor windows looked out upon the broad terrace, beyond which there was a garden, or pleasaunce, sloping down to the park. In the centre of this long façade there was an archway, opening into a stone quadrangle, where a fountain played perpetually in a marble basin. This was Raynham Castle, and all the woods and pastures as far as the eye could reach, and far beyond the reach of any human eye, belonged to the castle estate. This was the fair domain of which Reginald Eversleigh had been for years the acknowledged heir, and which his own folly and dishonour had forfeited.