, and I think he feels
so himself;' and Lancelot stole an encouraging look at Tregarva.

'And I say, sir,' the keeper answered, with an effort, 'that I leave
Mr. Lavington's service here on the spot, once and for all.'

'And that you may do, my fine fellow!' roared the squire. 'Pay the
rascal his wages, steward, and then duck him soundly in the weir-
pool. He had better have stayed there when he fell in last.'

'So I had, indeed, I think. But I'll take none of your money. The
day Harry Verney was buried I vowed that I'd touch no more of the
wages of blood. I'm going, sir; I never harmed you, or meant a hard
word of all this for you, or dreamt that you or any living soul
would ever see it. But what I've seen myself, in spite of myself,
I've set down here, and am not ashamed of it. And woe,' he went on
with an almost prophetic solemnity in his tone and gesture--'woe to
those who do these things! and woe to those also who, though they
dare not do them themselves, yet excuse and defend them who dare,
just because the world calls them gentlemen, and not tyrants and
oppressors.'

He turned to go. The squire, bursting with passion, sprang up with
a terrible oath, turned deadly pale, staggered, and dropped
senseless on the floor.

They all rushed to lift him up. Tregarva was the first to take him
in his arms and place him tenderly in his chair, where he lay back
with glassy eyes, snoring heavily in a fit of apoplexy.

'Go; for God's sake, go,' whispered Lancelot to the keeper, 'and
wait for me at Lower Whitford. I must see you before you stir.'

The keeper slipped away sadly. The ladies rushed in--a groom
galloped off for the doctor--met him luckily in the village, and, in
a few minutes, the squire was bled and put to bed, and showed
hopeful signs of returning consciousness. And as Argemone and
Lancelot leant together over his pillow, her hair touched her
lover's, and her fragrant breath was warm upon his cheek; and her
bright eyes met his and drank light from them, like glittering
planets gazing at their sun.

The obnoxious ballad produced the most opposite effects on Argemone
and on Honoria. Argemone, whose reverence for the formalities and
the respectabilities of society, never very great, had, of late,
utterly vanished before Lancelot's bad counsel, could think of it
only as a work of art, and conceived the most romantic longing to
raise Tregarva into some station where h