ho, as a Roman
Catholic, was not capable of taking in his own name.

Fully, only too fully, enlightened by Flavia's letter, Colonel John
barely glanced at the parchments; for, largely as these, with their
waxen discs, prepared to receive the impress of the signet on his
finger, bulked on the table, the gist of all lay in the letter. He had
fallen into a trap--a trap as cold, cruel, heartless as the bosom of
her who had decoyed him hither. Without food or water! And already the
chill of the earthen floor was eating into his bones, already the damp
of a hundred years was creeping over him.

For the moment he lacked the spirit to rise and contend by movement
against the one or the other. He sat gazing at the paper with dull
eyes. For, after all, whose interests had he upheld? Whose cause had he
supported against James McMurrough and his friends? For whose sake had
he declared himself master at Morristown, with no intention, no
thought, as Heaven was his witness, of deriving one jot or one tittle
of advantage for himself? Flavia's! Always Flavia's! And she had penned
this! she had planned this! She had consigned him to this, playing to
its crafty end the farce that had blinded him!

His mind, as he sat brooding, travelled back to the beginning of it
all; to the day on which Sir Michael's letter, with a copy of his will,
had reached his hands, at Stralsund on the Baltic, in his quarters
beside the East Gate, in one of those Hanse houses with the tall narrow
fronts which look like nothing so much as the gable-ends of churches.
The cast of his thoughts at the reading rose up before him; the vivid
recollections of his home, his boyhood, his father, which the old man's
writing had evoked, and the firmness with which, touched by the dead
man's confidence, a confidence based wholly on report, he had resolved
to protect the girl's interests. Sir Michael had spoken so plainly of
James as to leave the reader under no delusion about him. Nevertheless,
Colonel John had conceived some pity for him; in a vague way he had
hoped that he might soften things for him when the time came. But that
the old man's confidence should be justified, the young girl's
inheritance secured to her--this had been the purpose in his mind from
first to last.

And this was his reward!

True, that purpose would not have embroiled him with her, strong as was
her love for her brother, if it had not become entwined under the
stress of events with another--wi