s certain, Michel? you know this to be true?"

"I saw the old General myself, and heard him talk with the waiter."

"The combat will, then, be a close one," muttered D'Esmonde. "Grounsell
has done this, and it shall cost them dearly. Mark me, Michel--all that
the rack and the thumb-screw were to our ancestors, the system of
a modern trial realizes in our day. There never was a torture, the
invention of man's cruelty, as terrible as cross-examination! I care
not that this Dalton should have been as innocent as you are of this
crime,--it matters little if his guiltlessness appear from the very
outset. Give me but two days of searching inquiry into his life, his
habits, and his ways. Let me follow him to his fireside, in his poverty,
and lay bare all the little straits and contrivances by which he eked
out existence, and maintained a fair exterior. Let me show them to the
world, as I can show them, with penury within, and pretension without
These disclosures cannot be suppressed as irrelevant,--they are the
alleged motives of the crime. The family that sacrifices a child to a
hateful alliance----that sells to Austrian bondage the blood of an only
son--and consigns to menial labor a maimed and sickly girl, might well
have gone a step further in crime."

"D'Esmonde! D'Esmonde!" cried the other, as he pressed him down into a
seat, and took his hand between his own, "these are not words of calm
reason, but the outpourings of passion." The Abbe made no answer, but
his chest heaved and fell, and his breath came with a rushing sound,
while his eyes glared like the orbs of a wild animal.

"You are right, Michel," said he at last, with a faint sigh. "This was
a paroxysm of that hate which, stronger than all my reason, has actuated
me through life. Again and again have I told you that towards these
Daltons I bear a kind of instinctive aversion. These antipathies are
not to be combated,--there are brave men who will shudder if they see a
spider. I have seen a courageous spirit quail before a worm. These are
not caprices, to be laughed at,--they are indications full of pregnant
meaning, could we but read them aright. How my temples throb!--my head
seems splitting. Now leave me, Michel, for a while, and I will try to
take some rest."

CHAPTER XXXV. A TALK OVER BYGONES

It was with a burst of joy that Lady Hester heard the Daltons had
arrived. In the wearisome monotony of her daily life, anything to do,
anywhere to go, any o