22. Somebody in the Room with the Coffin
Chapter 23. I Talk with Doctor Bryerly
Chapter 24. The Opening of the Will
Chapter 25. I Hear from Uncle Silas
Chapter 26. The Story of Uncle Silas
Chapter 27. More About Tom Clarke’s Suicide
Chapter 29. How the Ambassador Fared
Chapter 35. We Visit a Room in the Second Storey
Chapter 36. An Arrival at Dead of Night
Chapter 37. Doctor Bryerly Emerges
Chapter 38. A Midnight Departure
Chapter 39. Cousin Monica and Uncle Silas Meet
Chapter 40. In which I Make Another Cousin’s Acquaintance
Chapter 42. Elverston and its People
Chapter 43. News at Bartram Gate
Chapter 45. A Chapter-Full of Lovers
Chapter 47. Doctor Bryerly Reappears
Chapter 48. Question and Answer
Chapter 51. Sarah Matilda Comes to Light
Chapter 52. The Picture of a Wolf
Chapter 54. In Search of Mr. Clarke’s Skeleton
Chapter 55. The Foot of Hercules
Chapter 58. Lady Knollys’ Carriage
Chapter 59. A Sudden Departure
Chapter 62. A Well-Known Face Looks in
Chapter 65. In the Oak Parlour
Chapter 1.
Austin Ruthyn, of Knowl, and His Daughter
IT WAS WINTER— that is, about the second week in November — and great gusts were rattling at the windows, and wailing and thundering among our tall trees and ivied chimneys — a very dark night, and a very cheerful fire blazing, a pleasant mixture of good round coal and spluttering dry wood, in a genuine old fireplace, in a sombre old room. Black wainscoting glimmered up to the ceiling, in small ebony panels; a cheerful chump of wax candles on the tea-table; many old portraits, some grim and pale, others pretty, and some very graceful and charming, hanging from the walls. Few pictures, except portraits long and short, were there. On the whole, I think you would have taken the room for our parlour. It was not like our modern notion of a drawing-room. It was a long room, too, and every way capacious, but irregularly shaped.
A girl of a little more than seventeen, looking, I believe, younger still; slight and rather tall, with a great deal of golden hair, dark grey-eyed, and with a countenance rather sensitive and melancholy, was sitting at the tea-table, in a reverie. I was that girl.
The only other person in the room — the only person in the house related to me — was my father. He was Mr. Ruthyn, of Knowl, so called in this county, but he had many other places, was of a very ancient lineage, who had refused a baronetage often, and it was said even a viscounty, being of a proud and defiant spirit, and thinking themselves higher in station and purer of blood than two-thirds of the nobility into whose ranks it was said, they had been invited to enter. Of all this family lore I knew but