eared, and Heriot and she burst into laughter, and the squire, with a
puzzled face, would have the game explained to him, but understood not a
bit of it, only growled at me; upon which Janet became serious and chid
him. I was told by my aunt Dorothy to admire this behaviour of hers. One
day she certainly did me a service: a paragraph in one of the newspapers
spoke of my father, not flatteringly: 'Richmond is in the field again,'
it commenced. The squire was waiting for her to hand the paper to him.
None of us could comprehend why she played him off and denied him his
right to the first perusal of the news; she was voluble, almost witty,
full of sprightly Roxalana petulance.

'This paper,' she said, 'deserves to be burnt,' and she was allowed
to burn it--money article, mining column as well--on the pretext of
an infamous anti-Tory leader, of which she herself composed the first
sentence to shock the squire completely. I had sight of that paper some
time afterwards. Richmond was in the field again, it stated, with mock
flourishes. But that was not the worst. My grandfather's name was down
there, and mine, and Princess Ottilia's. My father's connection with the
court of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld was alluded to as the latest, and next
to his winning the heiress of Riversley, the most successful of his
ventures, inasmuch as his son, if rumour was to be trusted, had obtained
the promise of the hand of the princess. The paragraph was an excerpt
from a gossiping weekly journal, perhaps less malevolent than I thought
it. There was some fun to be got out of a man who, the journal in
question was informed, had joined the arms of England and a petty German
principality stamped on his plate and furniture.

My gratitude to Janet was fervent enough when I saw what she had saved
me from. I pressed her hand and held it. I talked stupidly, but I made
my cruel position intelligible to her, and she had the delicacy, on this
occasion, to keep her sentiments regarding my father unuttered. We sat
hardly less than an hour side by side--I know not how long hand in hand.
The end was an extraordinary trembling in the limb abandoned to me.
It seized her frame. I would have detained her, but it was plain she
suffered both in her heart and her pride. Her voice was under fair
command-more than mine was. She counselled me to go to London, at once.
'I would be off to London if I were you, Harry,'--for the purpose
of checking my father's extravagances,--would