hand; and, in
his pity and despair, offered to cross the seas with her and her child,
and so repair the wrong he had done her.

"Tempt me not," she sobbed. "Go, leave me! None here shall ever know thy
crime, but she whose heart thou hast broken, and ruined her good name."

He took her in his arms, in spite of her resistance, and kissed her
passionately; but, for the first time, she shuddered at his embrace; and
that gave him the power to leave her.

He rushed from her, all but distracted, and rode away to Cumberland;
but not to tell the truth to Kate, if he could possibly help it.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

At this particular time, no man's presence was more desired in that
county than Griffith Gaunt's.

And this I need not now be telling the reader, if I had related this
story on the plan of a miscellaneous chronicle. But the affairs of the
heart are so absorbing, that, even in a narrative, they thrust aside
important circumstances of a less moving kind.

I must therefore go back a step, before I advance further. You must know
that forty years before our Griffith Gaunt saw the light, another
Griffith Gaunt was born in Cumberland: a younger son, and the family
estate entailed; but a shrewd lad, who chose rather to hunt fortune
elsewhere than to live in miserable dependence on his elder brother. His
godfather, a city merchant, encouraged him, and he left Cumberland. He
went into commerce, and in twenty years became a wealthy man,--so
wealthy that he lived to look down on his brother's estate, which he had
once thought opulence. His life was all prosperity, with a single
exception; but that a bitter one. He laid out some of his funds in a
fashionable and beautiful wife. He loved her before marriage; and, as
she was always cold to him, he loved her more and more.

In the second year of their marriage she ran away from him; and no
beggar in the streets of London was so miserable as the wealthy
merchant.

It blighted the man, and left him a sore heart all his days. He never
married again; and railed on all womankind for this one. He led a
solitary life in London till he was sixty-nine; and then, all of a
sudden, Nature, or accident, or both, changed his whole habits. Word
came to him that the family estate, already deeply mortgaged, was for
sale, and a farmer who had rented a principal farm on it, and held a
heavy mortgage, had made the highest offer.

Old Griffith sent down Mr. Atkins, his solicitor, post haste, and
s