s midnight expedition. He had hitherto only
despised this Trevethick and his friend, but now, since he feared them,
he began to hate them. Bodily discomfort combined with his mental
disquietude. For the first time he felt the keenness of the moonlit air,
and shivered in it, notwithstanding the hasty strides which he now was
taking homeward. Upon the hill-top he paused, and glanced about him. All
was as it had been when he set out; there was no sign of change nor
movement. The inn, with its drawn-down blinds, seemed itself asleep. The
front-door had been left ajar, doubtless by Harry; he pushed his way in,
and silently shut it to, and shot the bolt; then he took off his boots,
and walked softly up stairs in his stockinged feet. He knew that there
was at least one person in that house who was listening with beating
heart for every noise.

The ways of clandestine love have been justly described as "full of
cares and troubles, of fears and jealousies, of impatient waiting,
tediousness of delay, and sufferance of affronts, and amazements of
discovery;" and though Richard Yorke had never read those words of our
great English divine, he had already begun to exemplify them, and was
doomed to prove them to the uttermost.

CHAPTER XIX.

RICHARD BURNS HIS BOATS.

It was strange enough that day after day and week after week went by
without John Trevethick making any reference to the application his
guest had made for his daughter's hand. His silence certainly seemed to
favor it; and the more so since, notwithstanding what he knew, he put no
obstacles in the way of the young people's meeting and enjoying each
other's society as heretofore. Perhaps he had too strong a confidence in
Harry's sense of duty, or in the somewhat more than filial fear in which
she stood of him. Perhaps Richard's prudent and undemonstrative behavior
toward the girl in the presence of others deceived him. But, at all
events, the summer came and still found Richard under the same roof with
Harry, and more like one of the family than ever. Tourists of the young
man's own position in life, and even of the same profession, began to
visit Gethin, and of course "put up" at the _Castle_, but he found
nothing so attractive in their company as to withdraw him from that
homely coterie in the bar parlor for a single evening. He was always
made welcome there by both his host and Solomon; and without doubt, so
far as the former was concerned, a less sanguine m