he source be pride, or something less stubborn, but the warning which
we reject so cavalierly from our fellows, comes with a wondrous force of
conviction from the gentler sex.

For the heavy sums he had lost at play, for all the wasteful outlay of
his money, Cashel cared little; but for the humiliating sense of being
a "dupe" and a "tool," his outraged pride suffered deeply; and when Lady
Kilgoff drew a picture, half real, half imaginary, of the game which his
subtle associate was playing, Roland could scarce restrain himself from
openly declaring a rupture, and, if need be, a quarrel with him.

It needed all her persuasions to oppose this course; and, indeed, if she
had not made use of one unanswerable argument, could she have succeeded.
This was the inevitable injury Linton could inflict upon _her_, by
ascribing the breach to her influence. It would be easy enough, from
such materials as late events suggested, to compose a history that would
ruin her. Lord Kilgoff's lamentable imbecility, the result of that fatal
night of danger; Cashel's assiduous care of her; her own most natural
dependence upon him,--all these, touched on with a woman's tact and
delicacy, she urged, and at last obtained his pledge that he would leave
to time and opportunity the mode of terminating an intimacy he had begun
to think of with abhorrence.

If there be certain minds to whom the very air they breathe is doubt,
there are others to whom distrust is absolute misery. Of these latter
Cashel was one. Nature had made him frank and free-spoken, and the
circumstances of his early life had encouraged the habit. To nourish a
grudge would have been as repulsive to his sense of honor as it would be
opposed to all the habits of his buccaneering life. To settle a dispute
with the sword was invariably the appeal among his old comrades; and
such arbitraments are those which certainly leave the fewest traces of
lingering malice behind them. To cherish and store up a secret wrong,
and wait in patience for the day of reckoning, had something of the
Indian about it that, in Roland's eyes, augmented its atrocity.

Oppressed with thoughts like these, and associating every vexation he
suffered as in some way connected with that wealth whose possession he
fancied was to satisfy every wish and every ambition, he sauntered on,
little disposed to derive pleasure from the presence of those external
objects which fortune had made his own.

"When I was poor," thoug