Cleek recognized them at once. Here were the chief actors in the little comedy of what was at present a girl's imaginings, and which he sincerely hoped would never become anything else. What a hard face the man had! What a trap-like mouth! What a merciless, seeking eye! And the woman with him – all soft curves and roundness, with those luminous eyes of southern Italy looking out at him from the frame of her pale, ivory-tinted face, with already a hint of coquetry in their velvet depths for any well-dressed, well-apportioned specimen of mankind. Beside the something rugged and clear-cut in Maud Duggan's personality – the something Scotch and enduring which is the birthright of those born beyond the boundary-line of England – this woman's pale suavity fell into a kittenish foolishness, became instantly trivial and beyond recognizance.

At sound of their approach Maud Duggan turned hurriedly and waved a hand toward Cleek.

"Father," said she in her low, level-toned voice, "this is Mr. Deland of whom I told you last night. Mr. Deland is engaged to Ailsa Lorne, my old school friend at the convent in Paris – and he has come down for the fishing, and did me the honour to call upon me the very first thing. I have asked him to stay and lunch with us."

Sir Andrew bowed stiffly and then extended a blue-veined and tremulous hand. Cleek took it and bent over it like a courtier.

"Very pleased indeed to see you, Mr. Deland," said Sir Andrew, in a deep, full-throated voice that spoke more of the man he had been than of the man he was now. "You are welcome to our hospitality now and at any other time."

"I am deeply grateful, sir, and during my short stay in these parts I shall hope to make fuller acquaintance of you and your family – your wife? How do you do, Lady Paula? I am enamoured of your charming surroundings and your glorious home. May I be permitted to congratulate you upon both?"

A fleet look flashed from her eyes, a swift warmth of friendship for this stranger who made her so much one of them who had never yet been made one by the family themselves.

"It is beautiful, isn't it?" Smooth as velvet her voice, warm, subtle, alluring as the country that gave her birth. "I love it —how I love it! Even though I am not of the Scotch blood, yet have I that birthright of my nation – home-love. Maud, dear, take Mr. Deland round, won't you? I have still some matters to arrange with your father, so you must do the honours in my stead. And when Sir Andrew and I have finished with our little personal matters" – she smiled suddenly, showing a flash of snowy teeth between the warm red lips which Time had not yet cooled to the more even tenor of England's blood – "then we will join you upon the terrace. And be sure and show Mr. Deland the electric-lighting plant, dear. He will be interested."

Maud Duggan flashed her a look of absolute hatred at this, for she saw the darkening shade upon her father's face, and noted the sudden clenching of the hand upon his stick.

"Cursed modernism and all its extravagant ways!" said the old gentleman in a bitter voice. "Spending that which he should have saved, sir, upon a ridiculous experiment which has ruined the atmosphere of the place entirely. Wayward fool!"

"But it has improved your reading faculties, anyhow, Father," put in Miss Duggan in a quiet, resolute voice. "Paula is not nearly so busy nowadays, when you can read your own papers – "

"As though I ever wanted to do anything but wait upon him – dear man!" struck in Lady Paula reproachfully, and with an arch glance at Cleek which did not go unrewarded. "Your father is not so old a man as to be in his dotage. And if there is twenty years between us, Maud, it is hardly kind of you to bring the matter up like this. Perfect love should have no age nor yet youth. It should be as ageless as Eternity, as boundless as the sea, as high as Heaven itself… Are you ready, Andrew dear?"

She bent toward the flattered and fluttered old man with that something in her gesture which has been the gift of every woman of her type all down the long ages since Scylla tempted Ulysses and Charybdis sent his head whirling with her lure.

Maud Duggan led Cleek from the room at that, and once out of earshot of this ill-assorted pair, whirled round upon him, a spot of anger showing in each cheek.

"You see, Mr. Deland, you see?" she rapped out excitedly, "how she misleads everything we say, and turns it all to her own ends? Oh, how I hate her – hate her! and have done so ever since she first set foot in this dear old home of ours. And Father – did you notice how worn and ill he looks? How his hand shakes so that he cannot steady it? Three months ago his hand was like a rock; his colour was as healthy as yours or mine. And yet your Mr. Narkom would say that a woman's intuition leads to nothing but her own foolish imaginings!"

"Hush, my dear young lady – have a care!" threw in Cleek quickly, at the sound of footsteps hurrying toward them, his lips tightening in a way that suggested that he, too, thought there might be "something in it." "We don't want the whole place to suspect my mission. That is our secret, if you please. Now, show me the Castle, if you will – and whatever of interest which you think has bearing upon the case. Where is Lady Paula's son? Does he live here, or is he away at school just now?"

Miss Duggan shook her head.

"No – Cyril is a delicate boy, and the doctor has advised Father to let him stay home for a year and just run wild. He is generally with Ross."

"With Ross?"

"Yes, the two are sworn friends. Cyril's heart is wrapped up in Ross, Mr. Deland. He never for one moment suspects what his mother is trying to do – wrest Ross's inheritance from him so that he, Cyril, should have it instead. It would break his heart, I think. Wherever Ross is to be found you may be sure Cyril will be there also."

"Damon and Pythias, eh? Strange that the son loves what the mother hates, isn't it? I should like to meet this boy."

"You shall – when we reach the laboratory. He's sure to be there helping Ross. He is like his shadow, that child."

"And he is sixteen, you say?"

"Next October. And a firm believer in our ghost, Mr. Deland."

"Then you have a ghost and all complete?"

"Of course. Hasn't Mr. Fairnish of the Three Fishers told you the story yet? He is usually to be relied upon to impart every bit of village gossip within the first five minutes of one's acquaintance!"

Cleek threw back his head and laughed. They had entered a long, low-ceilinged room, panelled in Spanish leather, with casement windows which gave upon a little walled-in enclosure surrounded by flowering shrubs and white-starred syringa-bushes that sent their pungent odour upon the air in one long waft of perfume.

"He's told me a good deal, it is true, but – What a delightful room! A library, I take it? And what a curious old instrument that is! I haven't seen a spinning wheel like that since I was in Wales and one stood in the corner of the room where I slept at the village inn. A sort of heirloom, I suppose?"

She nodded, and Cleek crossed over to the thing to examine it, touching a part here and a part there with reverent fingers.

"Yes, I suppose you would call it that," she responded, crossing over to him and looking down at the thing in question. "Though, really, why Father has it here I cannot imagine. Its history is certainly not a credit to the line. For it belonged to the very girl I was going to tell you about. It belonged to the Family Ghost. Here is the story. The villagers believe it to this day, and couldn't be persuaded to enter the Castle grounds at night upon any pretext whatever. But of course the educated folk don't. Early in the sixteenth century a wild head of the Macduggan clan abducted a young – and I imagine beautiful – peasant-girl when she was sitting at her wheel, spinning, and ran away with her – wheel and all – and brought her here, so legend says, to this very room. The girl, whose name, I believe, was Dhurea, or something like that, stabbed herself with the sharp-pointed spindle of the wheel, and in doing so laid a curse upon the Macduggan clan. She – she was going to have a child, Mr. Deland, and as she was dying, she swore that in every generation a Duggan should die a violent death, and that the sound of her spinning wheel should predict the moment when death was near."

"Oho!" said Cleek, in two different tones. "That differs a good deal from the story Mr. Fairnish tells. There was a child, I understood, and this child was stolen by the grandparents. That's not correct, then?"

"There are various interpretations of the legend. No one knows the truth – only that she killed herself and cursed the family in that unpleasant manner."

"And has the curse come true?"

For a moment Miss Duggan hesitated. Then she sent startled eyes up into his face. There was the look of a dog at bay in them.

"I don't believe the story, Mr. Deland! I don't believe a word of it, for such things cannot possibly be, in this civilized country," she answered in a scared tone. "And yet – ever since that day, one at least of each generation has died unnaturally. And now – in this generation there is only Father and Ross… This peasant-girl is supposed to haunt our dear Castle, and after midnight to stalk the place over, looking for the man who dishonoured her and who has been dead these many generations past."

"H'm! I see. And so, naturally, she cannot find him. A weird story, and more pleasant in the daylight than in the dark. And this is the lady's spinning wheel, I take it? Your father has it by his writing-table, I see. Rather in the way, isn't it?"

"It used to stand over there, in the corner, but Paula declared that it was too dark there, and that it did not show to its full beauty. So she moved it. Father lets her do whatever she wishes. And of course it does show better there, by the window, doesn't it? And as it's Father's left hand that comes beside it, Mr. Deland, I don't really see that it much matters."

"No, I suppose not… Hello! we've been a long time here, haven't we? And I haven't seen the half of the place yet. Isn't that the luncheon gong? Or is it just your tangy Highland air that makes me hungry enough to imagine it?"

"Neither," said she, laughing. "That's Rhea's bell. It hangs just under the bronze statue of Rhea – you remember the one I showed you yesterday as we came home together? – and it rings upon the entrance of any one through the great gate. A clumsy contraption, which has never been altered in all these years."

"But quite useful – with unwanted visitors," he replied, stooping suddenly and picking up something off the carpet. "Hello, what's this? Looks like a bit of flexible electric wire. Something of your brother's hobby, no doubt."

He held it out to her in the open palm of his hand. It was just a little scrap of crimson-covered flexible wire, and she barely noticed it.

"And … hello, hello! No electricity used in here, either. I suppose that's because your father doesn't approve?"

"Yes. Ross wired the room – or had it wired with the aid of an electrician – and then installed the light. But Father was so angry that he would rarely ever use it. Sticks to the musty old lamp over there, for most things."

"And is the room still wired?"

"Yes. There's a wall plug over there by the door. Why, Mr. Deland?"

"Oh, nothing. Then that would account for this fragment of flexible wire, wouldn't it? H'm. Yes. I see. I see."

But what he saw he did not at that moment mention, and Miss Duggan had to guess at his meaning.

"But it was done ten days ago – I must really speak to the servants and tell them to keep the place cleaner than they do. Fancy leaving odd pieces about like that!" she ejaculated, sensitive to any suggestion of poor management upon the part of Castle authorities. But Cleek did not hear. He was standing over by the wall-plug, looking down at it, and then kneeling, began to examine it minutely. She watched him in amazement, unused to his methods.

"Why, Mr. Deland – "

"Oh, just looking at how your brother does his work. Quite a good workman, isn't he?" said Cleek, rising slowly to his feet, and pocketing the bit of flexible wire forthwith.

And that was the last word she could get out of him upon the subject.