One midnight of a winter month the sleepers in Riversley Grange were awakenedby a ringing of the outer bell and blows upon the great hall-doors. SquireBeltham was master there: the other members of the household were, his daughterDorothy Beltham; a married daughter Mrs. Richmond; Benjamin Sewis, an oldhalf-caste butler; various domestic servants; and a little boy, christenedHarry Lepel Richmond, the squire's grandson. Riversley Grange lay in a richwatered hollow of the Hampshire heath-country; a lonely circle of enclosedbrook and pasture, within view of some of its dependent farms, but out of hailof them or any dwelling except the stables and the head-gardener's cottage.Traditions of audacious highwaymen, together with the gloomy surroundingfir-scenery, kept it alive to fears of solitude and the night; and there wasthat in the determined violence of the knocks and repeated bell-peals whichassured all those who had ever listened in the servants' hall toprognostications of a possible night attack, that the robbers had come at lastmost awfully. A crowd of maids gathered along the upper corridor of the mainbody of the building: two or three footmen hung lower down, bold in attitude.Suddenly the noise ended, and soon after the voice of old Sewis commanded themto scatter away to their beds; whereupon the footmen took agile leaps to thepost of danger, while the women, in whose bosoms intense curiosity nowsupplanted terror, proceeded to a vacant room overlooking the front entrance,and spied from the window.