nd injurious reports will
soon drive him from the country, and from an estate he shall never
revisit as his own! So far,--the first act of the drama! The second
discovers Tom Linton the owner of Tubbermore, and the host of Lord and
Lady Kilgoff, who have condescendingly agreed to pass the Easter recess
with him. Mr. Linton has made a very splendid maiden speech, which,
however, puzzles the ministers and the 'Times;' and, if he were not a
man perfectly indifferent to place, would expose him to the imputation
of courting it.

"And Laura all this while!" said he, in a voice whose accents trembled
with intense feeling, "can she forgive the past? Will old memories
revive old affections, or will they rot into hatred? Well," cried he,
sternly, "whichever way they turn, I 'm prepared."

There was a tone of triumphant meaning in his last words that seemed to
thrill through his frame, and as he threw himself back upon his seat,
and gazed out upon the starry sky, his features wore the look of proud
and insolent defiance. "So is it," said he, after a pause; "one must be
alone--friendless, and alone--in life, to dare the world so fearlessly."
He filled a goblet of sherry, and as he drank it off, cried, "Courage!
Tom Linton against 'the field!'"

CHAPTER XXI. THE CONSPIRATORS DISTURBED

Eternal friendship let us swear,
In fraud at least--"nous serons freres."

Robert Macaire.

Cashel passed a night of feverish anxiety. Enrique's uncertain fate was
never out of his thoughts; and if for a moment he dropped off to sleep,
he immediately awoke with a sudden start,--some fancied cry for help,
some heart-uttered appeal to him for assistance breaking in upon his
weary slumber.

How ardently did he wish for some one friend to whom he might confide
his difficulty, and from whom receive advice and counsel. Linton's
shrewdness and knowledge of life pointed him out as the fittest; but
how to reveal to his fashionable friend the secrets of that buccaneering
life he had himself so lately quitted? How expose himself to the dreaded
depreciation a "fine gentleman" might visit on a career passed amid
slavers and pirates? A month or two previous, he could not have
understood such scruples; but already the frivolities and excesses of
daily habit had thrown an air of savage rudeness over the memory of his
Western existence, and he had not the courage to brave the comments it
might suggest To this false shame had Linton brou