e turned
impatiently from the casement, "that I am baffled here where my fortunes
seemed most assured? Here the mind has been of my own training, and
prepared by nature to my hand; here all opportunity has smiled. And
suddenly the merest commonplace in the vulgar lives of mortals,--an
unlooked-for rival; rival, too, of the mould I had taught her to
despise; one of the stock gallants of a comedy, no character but youth
and fair looks,--yea, the lover of the stage starts up, and the fabric
of years is overthrown." As he thus mused, he placed his hand upon
a small box on one of the tables. "Yet within this," resumed his
soliloquy, and he struck the lid, that gave back a dull sound,--"within
this I hold the keys of life and death! Fool! the power does not
reach to the heart, except to still it. Verily and indeed were the
old heathens mistaken? Are there no philters to change the current of
desire? But touch one chord in a girl's affection, and all the rest is
mine, all, all, lands, station, power, all the rest are in the opening
of this lid!"

Hide in the cloud, O Moon! shrink back, ye Stars! send not your holy,
pure, and trouble-lulling light to the countenance blanched and livid
with the thoughts of murder.

CHAPTER III. CONFERENCES.

The next day Sir Miles did not appear at breakfast,--not that he was
unwell, but that he meditated holding certain audiences, and on such
occasions the good old gentleman liked to prepare himself. He belonged
to a school in which, amidst much that was hearty and convivial, there
was much also that nowadays would seem stiff and formal, contrasting the
other school immediately succeeding him, which Mr. Vernon represented,
and of which the Charles Surface of Sheridan is a faithful and admirable
type. The room that Sir Miles appropriated to himself was, properly
speaking, the state apartment, called, in the old inventories, "King
James's chamber;" it was on the first floor, communicating with the
picture-gallery, which at the farther end opened upon a corridor
admitting to the principal bedrooms. As Sir Miles cared nothing for
holiday state, he had unscrupulously taken his cubiculum in this
chamber, which was really the handsomest in the house, except the
banquet-hall, placed his bed in one angle with a huge screen before it,
filled up the space with his Italian antiquities and curiosities; and
fixed his favourite pictures on the faded gilt leather panelled on the
walls. His main motiv