so still!"

Here the Doctor paused a long while, and leaned back in his chair,
slowly puffing long whiffs from his pipe, looking up at the great
spider-demon that hung over his head, and, as it seemed to the children
by the expression of his face, looking into the dim secret chamber
which he had spoken of, and which, by something in his mode of alluding
to it, assumed such a weird, spectral aspect to their imaginations that
they never wished to hear of it again. Coming back at length out of his
reverie,--returning, perhaps, out of some weird, ghostly, secret
chamber of his memory, whereof the one in the old house was but the
less horrible emblem,--he resumed his tale. He said that, a long time
ago, a war broke out in the old country between King and Parliament. At
that period there were several brothers of the old family (which had
adhered to the Catholic religion), and these chose the side of the King
instead of that of the Puritan Parliament: all but one, whom the family
hated because he took the Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and
fought against his own brothers; and it was said among them that, so
inveterate was he, he went on the scaffold, masked, and was the very
man who struck off the King's head, and that his foot trod in the
King's blood, and that always afterwards he made a bloody track
wherever he went. And there was a legend that his brethren once caught
the renegade and imprisoned him in his own birthplace--

"In the secret chamber?" interrupted Ned.

"No doubt!" said the Doctor, nodding, "though I never heard so."

They imprisoned him, but he made his escape and fled, and in the
morning his prison-place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the