mstances and
be the parent of a line of successive impulses, in the main resembling
an extremely far-sighted plot, whereat he gazed back with fondness, all
the while protesting sincerely his perfect innocence of anything of
the kind. Circumstances will often interwind with the moods of simply
irritated men. In the present instance he could just perceive what might
immediately come of his reading out of this atrocious epistle wherein
Nevil Beauchamp was displayed the dangling puppet of a mountebank
wire-pulley, infidel, agitator, leveller, and scoundrel. Cognizant
of Mr. Romfrey's overtures to Colonel Halkett, he traced them to that
scheming woman in the house at Steynham, and he was of opinion that it
was a friendly and good thing to do to let the old colonel and Cissy
Halkett know Mr. Nevil through a bit of his correspondence. This, then,
was a matter of business and duty that furnished an excuse for his going
out of his, way to call at Mount Laurels on the old familiar footing, so
as not to alarm the heiress.

A warrior accustomed to wear the burnished breastplates between London
and Windsor has, we know, more need to withstand than to discharge
the shafts of amorous passion; he is indeed, as an object of beauty,
notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must
practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself: and no doubt
it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet
ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses,
dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection. But an
heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress;
his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament and
the prop of his position; and it should be added that his pride, all
the habits of thought of a conqueror of women, had been shocked by that
stupefying rejection of him, which Cecilia had intimated to her father
with the mere lowering of her eyelids. Conceive the highest bidder at an
auction hearing the article announce that it will not have him! Captain
Baskelett talked of it everywhere for a month or so:--the girl could
not know her own mind, for she suited him exactly! and he requested the
world to partake of his astonishment. Chronicles of the season in London
informed him that he was not the only fellow to whom the gates were
shut. She could hardly be thinking of Nevil? However, let the epistle be
read. 'Now for t