“Really, my dear child, you puzzle me. I hardly know how to answer. I must have had a great many thoughts during all the years since, in my boyhood, I heard the first stories of the ghosts of the old chapel. And there was one thing curious. For many years—for almost two-score, I should say, those stories died out.
“Of late, however, within ten or a dozen years, they have revived. I remember, it was during the very week of your father’s death, a number of our servants were frightened by a ghost—the ghost, they said, of a gray friar—wandering about the old ruin. But—but—it was, of course, the veriest nonsense.”
Cordelia looked up into the old man’s face searchingly. She looked so sharply, and with so much of meaning in the look, that he shrank away from it, and his eyes, usually so honest and true, wavered.
“Grandpa! grandpa! There is something you do not tell me. What is it? Come, you surely can have nothing that you would wish to hide from your darling.”
“Child! child! why are you so eager? Ah! tell me, were you in the chapel through the storm? Why of course you were. You told me so. Did you see anything?”
“Grandpa, I want you to answer me first. You ought to. You are the oldest, and should take the lead. Tell me, what was it you kept back from me?”
Once more, after a little further hesitation, the frank, steady, and straightforward look came back to the old earl’s eyes; and he said, first casting a swift glance around:
“Cordelia, the story I am going to tell you I have never told to anybody. It has puzzled me; and I have tried to solve the mystery involved; but I have kept it to myself.
“You will remember, shortly before your father’s death, his old attorney, John Chudley, came up to make the papers necessary to prove my appointment as your guardian, and to make the will, and so on. You will remember also that his son Charles came with him. Charles was at that time somewhere near twenty years old; and he was observant and reliable, as was his father.
“Well, one day, while they were here, after the legal business had all been done, those two, the Chudleys, went off up the river after fish, a sport of which they were fond, and of which they got little at home. They fished through the greater part of the day, and on their way home they took a fancy to climb Witch’s Crag. Suffice it to say—they went up—”