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"This man, Agnes, is good-looking, and yet with a bad face. It is rather coarse perhaps, more so than it was ten years since when I first saw him, for that sort of face, when it once begins to go off, loses its beauty rapidly; still, I allow, much as I object to the man, that he is handsome. It is just the sort of face likely to attract a young girl who is new to the world. A face apparently frank and good-natured, and yet with something��imperious and even defiant about it; very taking to the young, who cannot help feeling flattered by seeing that the man, who looks as if he neither cared for nor feared any other living thing, should yet bow to them; that the fierce eye should soften, and the loud voice become gentle when he addresses them. Altogether a dangerous man for a young girl to know, a very dangerous one for her to love. To a man like myself, accustomed from habit and profession to study character, he is peculiarly repulsive. His face to me is all bad. The man is not only a blackguard, and a handsome blackguard, but he is a clever and determined one; his face is marked with lines of profligacy and drunkenness, and there is a passionate, dangerous flash about his eye. He has, too, seen the world, although only a bad side of it; but he can, when he chooses, lay aside his roughness and rampant blackguardism, and assume a tolerably gentlemanly, quiet demeanour, which would very well pass muster with an inexperienced girl. In short, my dear, if I were asked to select the man of all others, of those with whom I am acquainted, whom I would least rather meet in any society where my daughter, or any young girl might see him, I should unhesitatingly say��Robert Gregory. Fortunately for society here, the man, by his well-known drunken and bad character, has placed himself beyond its pale, and so he can do it no great harm. It was only the last time that I was in Canterbury that I heard, and I acknowledge that I heard with great pleasure, that Robert Gregory was so deeply in debt that writs were out against him; and that unless he went away he would in a short time be consigned to a debtor's prison, so that Canterbury, at any rate for some time, might hope to be free of him. Well, my dear, I daresay you are wondering what all this long story about a person of whom you know nothing can be going to end in, but you will see that it is all very much to the point. To-day I was rather earlier than usual in my visit to Mr. Harmer. I was driving fast, and as I turned the corner of the road where the plantation in Mr. Harmer's ground begins, I saw a man getting over the hedge into the road. Probably the noise he was making breaking through the twigs, together with the turn of the road, prevented his seeing or hearing the gig until he was fairly over; for as he jumped into the road and looked round I was not twenty yards off, and could hear him swear a deep oath, as he pulled his hat down over his eyes, and turned his back to me as I drove past to prevent my seeing his face; but it was too late, for I had recognized Robert Gregory. Of course I said nothing; but as I drove up to the house, looking over the grounds, I saw Sophy Needham coming up through the trees from the very direction from which I had seen him come out. She was at some distance off, and I was almost at the door, so I could not have stopped to speak to her without being noticed, even had I wished it. She did not come into the room while I was there, so that I had no opportunity of questioning her about it, even had I made up my mind to do so; indeed it was so delicate a matter that I could not have spoken to her without previous reflection.

"Alfred Ashleigh."

Sarah expressed herself so well that I was really quite surprised. I thanked her for her offer, and said, "You can, indeed, do us a service which may turn out of great importance. Now I do not disguise from you, it will cost you your place if you are discovered; but I need not say that we will take care that you shall be no loser by that. Now I will at once tell you how we stand at present, and what we want to find out. We know, or at least are nearly sure, that the will exists, and that it is with some other papers large enough to fill a good-sized box. Now we strongly believe that this box is hidden away in a secret room we know to exist in the house; and what we want to find out is, where is that secret room? It must be a pretty good size��I mean much larger than a mere closet��because we know people used to lay hid there in old times." Sarah nodded, as much as to say that she had heard legends of the "priest's chamber." "Now, Sarah, the first thing we want to discover is the whereabouts of this room��and this can only be done in one way. I want the exact dimensions��that is to say, the measure, the height, length, and breadth, of every room, passage, closet, and staircase in the old part of the house; because as this room existed in the old time, it is only in the central part of the house, which was the original building, that the secret chamber need be looked for. When I have got all these measurements, and put them all down upon paper, I shall see where there is a space to fill up. Do you understand?"

"You live here, then?"

So saying, and bowing to those present, who had not yet recovered sufficiently from their dismay to utter a word, he took the almost stupefied Mr. Harmer by the arm and left the room.

Although neither Polly nor I ever made any remark to each other about that conversation, we��or at least I can answer for myself��were not the less astonished at it. It seemed perfectly inexplicable to me. What objection could there be to our going to the Harmers? I was, as I have said, past fourteen, and was beginning to think and reason about all sorts of things, and this was a problem which I tried in vain for a long time to solve to my satisfaction. How I pondered the matter over in every light, but ever without success. Mamma had said it was a person. Now, person generally means a woman, and the only women at Harmer Place were the two Miss Harmers. Had it been a principle mamma objected to, I could have understood it, for the Miss Harmers were bigoted Catholics. Not that that would have made any difference with papa, who looked at these matters with a very latitudinarian eye. "In my opinion," I have heard him say, "the sect to which a man belongs makes but little difference, if he does but do his best according to his belief."

Thomas had certainly shown good taste in his selection, for his Sarah was a very pretty little girl,��a slight active figure, a bright clear complexion, brown hair waving back off her forehead, a cheerful smile, large speaking eyes with a little touch of sauciness in them��which I fancied would sometimes vex and puzzle Thomas, who was a steady matter-of-fact young groom, not a little��and a very prettily cut nose and mouth. I was altogether very much taken with her appearance.