CHAPTER XXIX.
A PEEP THROUGH AN IRON GRATING.—THE LONELY PRISONER IN HIS DUNGEON.—THE MYSTERY.
Without forestalling the interest of our story, or recording a fact in its wrong place, we now call our readers’ attention to a circumstance which may, at all events, afford some food for conjecture.
Some distance from the Hall, which, from time immemorial, had been the home and the property of the Bannerworth family, was an ancient ruin known by the name of the Monks’ Hall.
It was conjectured that this ruin was the remains of some one of those half monastic, half military buildings which, during the middle ages, were so common in almost every commanding situation in every county of England.
At a period of history when the church arrogated to itself an amount of political power which the int
