bits together, so that nobody could possibly recognise anything. My father knows one story which he says he can’t tell us—I believe he says so partly to tantalise us—which he declares would make a first-rate sensational novel.”

“And will he never be able to tell it to you?” I inquired, more for the sake of seeming interested in poor Rupert’s conversation than because I cared to hear. The young fellow was rather of the “old-fashioned” order; there was a certain quaintness in his way of speaking which was not without its charm, though now and then he tired my patience a little. He was so unlike anything of “boy” kind I had ever come across.

“I don’t know,” he said gravely. “Perhaps, if all the people it concerns were dead. But they are none of them very old; some, I believe, still almost young.”

“Then you do know something about it, after all,” I replied, my interest increasing.

“Scarcely anything,” said Rupert; “only this much, that it is a secret which affects a whole family, and that my father and one other are the only beings who are in their confidence. He has told Clarence and me that some day he may have to tell us—when he gets very old, or if his memory were failing. Two outsiders must know it.”

“And yet it affects a whole family,” I repeated. “They must be a very reticent set of people.”

“More than that—it has darkened the life of a whole family; that, I think, was my father’s exact expression,” said Rupert eagerly. “I often and often think about it, and wonder what the secret can be.”

As he said the words there suddenly flashed across my mind the remembrance of an almost similar exclamation that I had recently heard. Yes—it was Isabel speaking of the Grim House and its inhabitants. What a strange coincidence it would be if the family Rupert was speaking of should be the same people! Too strange to be possible, I thought, for I have greater belief, now that I have seen more of life, in coincidences than I had then.

But the idea did not remain in my mind. I dismissed it as too wildly improbable, and Rupert talked on about his contemplated works of fiction and their “plots” in so interesting a way, that the “stranger than fiction” story I had come across was for the time completely forgotten by me.