uch a man of honour though he drank; and the
adventures of Madge, Carinthia Jane's maid. Just a few touches. And then
the marriage dividing Great Britain into halves, taking sides. After
that, I trust you may go on, as I would carry you were we all twenty
years younger, had I but sooner been in possession of these treasured
papers. I promise you excitement enough, if justice is done to them. But
I must and will describe the wedding. This young Earl of Fleetwood, you
should know, was a very powder-magazine of ambition, and never would he
break his word: which is right, if we are properly careful; and so he--

She ceases. According to the terms of the treaty, the venerable lady's
time has passed. An extinguisher descends on her, giving her the
likeness of one under condemnation of 'the Most Holy Inqusition, in the
ranks of an 'auto da fe'; and singularly resembling that victim at the
first sharp bite of the flames she will, be when she hears the version
of her story.

CHAPTER IV. MORNING AND FAREWELL TO AN OLD HOME

Brother and sister were about to leave the mountainland for England.
They had not gone to bed overnight, and from the windows of their
deserted home, a little before dawn, they saw the dwindled moon, a late
riser, break through droves of hunted cloud, directly topping their
ancient guardian height, the triple peak and giant of the range,
friendlier in his name than in aspect for the two young people clinging
to the scene they were to quit. His name recalled old-days: the
apparition of his head among the heavens drummed on their sense of
banishment.

To the girl, this was a division of her life, and the dawn held the
sword. She felt herself midswing across a gulf that was the grave of one
half, without a light of promise for the other. Her passionate excess of
attachment to her buried home robbed the future of any colours it might
have worn to bid a young heart quicken. And England, though she was of
British blood, was a foreign place to her, not alluring: her brother
had twice come out of England reserved in speech; her mother's talk of
England had been unhappy; her father had suffered ill-treatment there
from a brutal institution termed the Admiralty, and had never regretted
the not seeing England again. The thought that she was bound thitherward
enfolded her like a frosty mist. But these bare walls, these loud
floors, chill rooms, dull windows, and the vault-sounding of the ghostly
house, everywher