od of man, the labour of
years, devoured in aimless ruin, when some one shouted: "The yeomanry!"
And at that sound a general panic ensued.

I did not care to run. I was utterly disgusted, disappointed, with
myself--the people. I just recollect the tramp of the yeomanry horses,
and a clear blade gleaming in the air, and after that I recollect
nothing--till I awoke and found myself lying on a truckle-bed in D----
gaol, and a warder wrapping my head with wet towels.

Mackaye engaged an old compatriot as attorney at the trial, and I was
congratulated on "only getting three years."

The weary time went by. Week after week, month after month, summer after
summer, I scored the days off, like a lonely schoolboy, on the pages of
a calendar.

Not till I was released did I learn from Sandy Mackaye that my cousin
George was the vicar of his church, and that he was about to marry
Lillian Winnstay.

_IV.--In Exile_

Brave old Sandy Mackaye died on the morning of the tenth of April, 1848,
the day of the great Chartist demonstration at Kennington Common.
Mackaye had predicted failure, and every one of his predictions came
true. The people did not rise. Whatever sympathy they had with us, they
did not care to show it. The meeting broke up pitiably piecemeal,
drenched and cowed, body and soul, by pouring rain.

That same night, after wandering dispiritedly in the streets by the
river, I was sick with typhus fever.

I know not for how long my dreams and delirium lasted, but I know that
at last I sank into a soft, weary, happy sleep.

Then the spell was snapped. My fever and my dreams faded away together,
and I woke to the twittering of the sparrows and the scent of the
poplars, and found Eleanor, Lady Ellerton, and her uncle sitting by my
bed, and with them Crossthwaite's little wife.

I would have spoken, but Eleanor laid her finger on her lips, and taking
her uncle's arm, glided from the room.

Slowly, and with relapses into insensibility, I passed, like one who
recovers from drowning, through the painful gate of birth into another
life.

Crossthwaite and his wife, as they sat by me, tender and careful nurses
both, told me in time that to Eleanor I owed all my comforts. "She's an
angel out of heaven," he said. "Ah, Alton, she was your true friend all
the time, and not that other one, if you had but known it."

I could not rest till I had heard more of Lady Ellerton.

"Why, then, she lives not far off. When her husb