owley.

"Yes, both," said I; "and you shall dance at the wedding"; and I flung
at his head a bundle of bank notes, and had just followed it up with a
handful of guineas, when the door opened, and Mr. Romaine appeared upon
the threshold.

CHAPTER XVIII

MR. ROMAINE CALLS ME NAMES

Feeling very much of a fool to be thus taken by surprise, I scrambled to
my feet and hastened to make my visitor welcome. He did not refuse me
his hand; but he gave it with a coldness and distance for which I was
quite unprepared, and his countenance, as he looked on me, was marked in
a strong degree with concern and severity.

"So, sir, I find you here?" said he, in tones of little encouragement.
"Is that you, George? You can run away; I have business with your
master."

He showed Rowley out, and locked the door behind him. Then he sat down
in an armchair on one side of the fire, and looked at me with
uncompromising sternness.

"I am hesitating how to begin," said he. "In this singular labyrinth of
blunders and difficulties that you have prepared for us, I am positively
hesitating where to begin. It will perhaps be best that you should read,
first of all, this paragraph." And he handed over to me a newspaper.

The paragraph in question was brief. It announced the recapture of one
of the prisoners recently escaped from Edinburgh Castle; gave his name
Clausel, and added that he had entered into the particulars of the
recent revolting murder in the Castle, and denounced the murderer:

"It is a common soldier called Champdivers, who had himself escaped,
and is in all probability involved in the common fate of his
comrades. In spite of the activity along all the Forth and the East
Coast, nothing has yet been seen of the sloop which these desperadoes
seized at Grangemouth, and it is now almost certain that they have
found a watery grave."

At the reading of this paragraph my heart turned over. In a moment I saw
my castle in the air ruined; myself changed from a mere military
fugitive into a hunted murderer, fleeing from the gallows; my love,
which had a moment since appeared so near to me, blotted from the field
of possibility. Despair, which was my first sentiment, did not, however,
endure for more than a moment. I saw that my companions had indeed
succeeded in their unlikely design; and that I was supposed to have
accompanied and perished along with them by shipwreck--a most probable
ending to their enterpris