If you don't--" he paused and smiled his sudden, winning smile into the old man's wrathful eyes--"I'll explain more fully when the time comes." "Confound you, Piers!" was Sir Beverley's only answer.
Yet he left the room with the boy's arm linked in his.

And the woman's face on the wall smiled behind them--the smile of a witch, mysterious, derisive, aloof, yet touched with that same magic with which Piers had learned even in his infancy to charm away the evil spirit that lurked in his grandfather's soul..