"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
shall never tremble. Hence horrible shadow!
Unreal mockery, hence!"--_MACBETH_


It was a gloomy evening, towards the autumn of the year 1676, and the
driving blasts which wept from the sea upon Greville Cross, a dreary
and exposed mansion on the coast of Lancashire, gave promise of a
stormy night and added to the desolation which at all traces pervaded
its vast and comfortless apartments.

Greville Cross had formerly been a Benedictine Monastery, and had
been bestowed at the Reformation, together with its rights of
Forestry upon Sir Ralph de Greville, the ancestor of its present
possessor. Although that part of the building containing the chapel
and refectory had been long in ruins, the remainder of the gloomy
quadrangle was strongly marked with the characteristics of its
monastic origin. It had never been a favourite residence of the
Greville family; who were possessed of two other magnificent seats,
at one of which, Silsea Castle in Kent, the present Lord Greville
constantly resided; and the Cross, usually so called from a large
iron cross which stood in the centre of the court-yard, and to which
thousand romantic legends were attached, had received few
improvements from the modernizing hand of taste. Indeed as the
faults of the edifice were those of solid construction, it would have
been difficult to render it less gloomy or more convenient by any
change that art could affect. Its massive walls and huge oaken
beams would neither permit the enlargement of its narrow windows,
nor the destruction of its maze of useless corridors; and it was