ompany of
friends, Flora Billingsgate greeted me with a saucy smile.

Guy was even squarer and sterner than ever. His gusts of passion were
more frequent, and it was with difficulty that he could keep an
able-bodied servant in his family. His present retainers were more or
less maimed from exposure to the fury of their master. There was a
strange cynicism, a cutting sarcasm in his address, piercing through
his polished manner. I thought of Timon, etc., etc.

One evening, we were sitting over our Chambertin, after a hard day's
work, and Guy was listlessly turning over some letters, when suddenly
he uttered a cry. Did you ever hear the trumpeting of a wounded
elephant? It was like that.

I looked at him with consternation. He was glancing at a letter which
he held at arm's length, and snorting, as it were, at it as he gazed.
The lower part of his face was stern, but not as rigid as usual. He
was slowly grinding between his teeth the fragments of the glass he had
just been drinking from. Suddenly he seized one of his servants, and,
forcing the wretch upon his knees, exclaimed, with the roar of a
tiger:--

"Dog! why was this kept from me?"

"Why, please, sir, Miss Flora said as how it was a reconciliation from
Miss Brandagee, and it was to be kept from you where you would not be
likely to see it,--and--and--"

"Speak, dog! and you--"

"I put it among your bills, sir!"

With a groan, like distant thunder, Guy fell swooning to the floor.

He soon recovered, for the next moment a servant came rushing into the
room with the information that a number of the ingenuous peasantry of
the neighborhood were about to indulge that evening in the national
pastime of burning a farm-house and shooting a landlord. Guy smiled a
fearful smile, without, however, altering his stern and pitiless
expression.

"Let them come," he said calmly; "I feel like entertaining company."

We barricaded the doors and windows, and then chose our arms from the
armory. Guy's choice was a singular one: it was a landing net with a
long handle, and a sharp cavalry sabre.

We were not destined to remain long in ignorance of its use. A howl
was heard from without, and a party of fifty or sixty armed men
precipitated themselves against the door.

Suddenly the window opened. With the rapidity of lightning, Guy
Heavystone cast the net over the head of the ringleader, ejaculated
"Habet!" and with a back stroke of his cavalry sabre severed th