enty-three years
before by Henry Burton on the Doncaster race-course, ostensibly on
account of the sudden withdrawal of a horse that should have started, a
transaction with which young Hornby was in some measure mixed up; but
especially and really for having dared, upon the strength of presumptive
heirship to his uncle's wealth, to advance pretensions to the fair hand
of Elizabeth Gainsford, the eldest daughter of Mr. Robert Gainsford,
surgeon, of Otley--pretensions indirectly favored, it was said, by the
father, but contemptuously repudiated by the lady. Be this as it may,
three weeks after the races, Elizabeth Gainsford became Mrs. Burton, and
James Hornby hurried off to London, grudgingly furnished for the journey
by his uncle. He obtained a situation as shopman in one of the large
grocer establishments of the metropolis; and twenty-three years
afterwards, the attorney's letter, informing him that he had succeeded to
all his deceased uncle's property, found him in the same place, and in
the same capacity.

A perfect yell of delight broke from the lips of the taciturn man as his
glance devoured the welcome intelligence. "At last!" he shouted with
maniacal glee; and fiercely crumpling the letter in his hand, as if he
held a living foe in his grasp, whilst a flash of fiendish passion broke
from the deep caverns of his sunken eyes--"at last I have thee on the
hip! Ah, mine enemy!--it is the dead--the dead alone that never return
to hurl back on the head of the wrong-doer the shame, the misery, the
ruin he inflicted in his hour of triumph!" The violence of passions
suddenly unreined after years of jealous curb and watchfulness for a
moment overcame him, and he reeled as if fainting, into a chair. The
fierce, stern nature of the man soon mastered the unwonted excitement,
and in a few minutes he was cold, silent, impassable as ever. The letter
which he despatched the same evening gave calm, business orders as to
his uncle's funeral, and other pressing matters upon which the attorney
had demanded instructions, and concluded by intimating that he should be
in Yorkshire before many days elapsed. He arrived, as we have seen, and
took up his abode at one of the houses bequeathed to him in Pool, which
happened to be unlet.

Yes, for more than twenty bitter years James Hornby had savagely brooded
over the shame and wrong inflicted on him before the mocking eyes of a
brutal crowd by Henry Burton. Ever as the day's routine business