handing a guinea to the man who presented it. On the scaffold not a
muscle moved as he surveyed the black crowd of onlookers with a calm and
amused eye. To the chaplain he confessed his belief in God; and he
exchanged a few pleasant words with the executioner as he placed a gold
coin in his hand.

Thus, cold, calm, without rancour or regret, perished Laurence, Earl
Ferrers, not even a struggle marking the moment when life left him.
After hanging for an hour, his body was taken down and removed to
Surgeons' Hall, where it was dissected; and, thus mutilated, it was
exposed to public derision and malediction before it found a final
resting-place, fourteen feet deep under the belfry of old St Pancras
Church.

Such is the stain which burns red on the Shirley shield, and such was
the man who placed it there. But, as we have seen, Laurence Shirley was
mad beyond all doubt, and "knew not what he did"; and in the eyes of all
charitable and right-thinking men the 'scutcheon of the Ferrers Earldom
remains as virtually unsullied to-day as when it was virginally fresh
two centuries ago.




CHAPTER V

A GHOSTLY VISITANT


There is scarcely a chapter in the story of the British Peerage more