t
old ass? Much better he should report to his prompter, Glossin, that we
are indifferent or lukewarm in the matter. Besides, I wished to have a
peep at the enemies' game.'

'Indeed!' said the soldier. 'Then I see there are stratagems in law as
well as war. Well, and how do you like their line of battle?'

'Ingenious,' said Mr. Pleydell, 'but I think desperate; they are
finessing too much, a common fault on such occasions.'

During this discourse the carriage rolled rapidly towards Woodbourne
without anything occurring worthy of the reader's notice, excepting their
meeting with young Hazlewood, to whom the Colonel told the extraordinary
history of Bertram's reappearance, which he heard with high delight, and
then rode on before to pay Miss Bertram his compliments on an event so
happy and so unexpected.

We return to the party at Woodbourne. After the departure of Mannering,
the conversation related chiefly to the fortunes of the Ellangowan
family, their domains, and their former power. 'It was, then, under the
towers of my fathers,' said Bertram, 'that I landed some days since, in
circumstances much resembling those of a vagabond! Its mouldering turrets
and darksome arches even then awakened thoughts of the deepest interest,
and recollections which I was unable to decipher. I will now visit them
again with other feelings, and, I trust, other and better hopes.'

'Do not go there now,' said his sister. 'The house of our ancestors is at
present the habitation of a wretch as insidious as dangerous, whose arts
and villainy accomplished the ruin and broke the heart of our unhappy
father.'

'You increase my anxiety,' replied her brother, 'to confront this
miscreant, even in the den he has constructed for himself; I think I have
seen him.'

'But you must consider,' said Julia, 'that you are now left under Lucy's
guard and mine, and are responsible to us for all your motions, consider,
I have not been a lawyer's mistress twelve hours for nothing, and I
assure you it would be madness to attempt to go to Ellangowan just now.
The utmost to which I can consent is, that we shall walk in a body to the
head of the Woodbourne avenue, and from that perhaps we may indulge you
with our company as far as a rising ground in the common, whence your
eyes may be blessed with a distant prospect of those gloomy towers which
struck so strongly your sympathetic imagination.'

The party was speedily agreed upon; and the ladies, having taken