CHAPTER I.

SIR JOHN MORTMAIN TURNED OVER the Sunday papers idly in search of some item of possible interest. It was one of those perfect mornings at the end of June, without the semblance of a cloud in the sky and the warm, languid air that conduces to sleepiness. Moreover, it was a Sunday morning, and Mortmain had nothing whatever to do. He sat in a long cane chair on the terrace in front of Mortmains, looking out across the slumbering sea and half wondering how he was going to get through the day.

Mortmain was a good deal of a sportsman and, though a good many people wondered what he did with himself half his time, he was no idler despite the fact that he was a rich man in possession of one of the finest estates in North Devon. More than that, he had been, up to a certain time one of the most promising of the younger school of novelists. His was a strange and whimsical fancy with a decided bent in the direction of the gruesome and the grim—in fact, a sort Stevenson-cum-Edgar Allen Poe frame of mind. In his earlier days he had written a couple of novels on these lines, and they had found decided favour in the eyes of the most discerning critics. In fact, he was well on the way to making a name for himself when fate took a hand in his affairs, and from a mere University graduate, more or less fighting his way in Fleet-street, he found himself in the possession of a title, to say nothing of a handsome income and one of the great ancestral estates, on the northern side of the county of Devon. It had only needed a motor accident in a fog along the romantic valley that led up to Mortmains Lodge, and two lives that stood between him and the twinkling of an eye. Then the late property had been swept away in the late baronet, who was already an old man, bent before the shock of his sons’ death, and John Mortmain found himself master of the fine old domain and the owner of a fortune that he had never expected.

He had come down there from London almost at once. He had turned his back upon all his old friends and had shut himself up in that glorious old house, where he entertained none and as