as formerly, yet with a sort of unreality, as if it would dissolve and
vanish on being touched; and, indeed, it partly proved so; for over the
Doctor's chair seemed still to hang the great spider, but on looking
closer at it, and finally touching it with the end of the Doctor's
stick, Ned discovered that it was merely the skin, shell, apparition,
of the real spider,[Endnote: 4] the reality of whom, it is to be
supposed, had followed the grim Doctor, whithersoever he had gone.

A thought struck Ned while he was here; he remembered the secret niche
in the wall, where he had once seen the Doctor deposit some papers. He
looked, and there they were. Who was the heir of those papers, if not
he? If there were anything wrong in appropriating them, it was not
perceptible to him in the desolation, anxiety, bewilderment, and
despair of that moment. He grasped the papers, and hurried from the
room and down the stairs, afraid to look round, and half expecting to
hear the gruff voice of Doctor Grim thundering after him to bring them
back.

Then Ned went out of the back door, and found his way to the Doctor's
new grave, which, as it happened, was dug close beside that one which
occupied the place of the one which the stranger had come to seek; and,
as if to spite the Doctor's professional antipathies, it lay beside a
grave of an old physician and surgeon, one Doctor Summerton, who used
to help diseases and kill patients above a hundred years ago. But
Doctor Grim was undisturbed by these neighbors, and apparently not more
by the grief of poor little Ned, who hid his face in the crumbly earth
of the grave, and the sods that had not begun to grow, and wept as if
his heart would break.

But the heart never breaks on the first grave; and, after many graves,