riend, for whom my esteem was the greater for his sorrows, my interest
the keener for his mystery, Reginald Glanville, was a murderer! a
dastardly, a barbarous felon, whom the chance of an instant might
convict!--and she--she, the only woman in the world I had ever really
loved--who had ever pierced the thousand folds of my ambitious and
scheming heart--she was the sister of the assassin!

Then came over my mind the savage and exulting eye of Thornton, when it
read the damning record of Glanville's guilt; and in spite of my horror
at the crime of my former friend, I trembled for his safety: nor was I
satisfied with myself at my prevarication as a witness. It is true, that
I had told the truth, but I had concealed all the truth; and my heart
swelled proudly and bitterly against the miniature which I still
concealed in my bosom.

Light as I may seem to the reader, bent upon the pleasures and the
honours of the great world, as I really was, there had never, since I
had recognized and formed a decided code of principles, been a single
moment in which I had transgressed it; and perhaps I was sterner and
more inflexible in the tenets of my morality, such as they were, than
even the most zealous worshipper of the letter, as well as the spirit of
the law and the prophets, would require. Certainly there were many pangs
within me, when I reflected, that to save a criminal, in whose safety
I was selfishly concerned, I had tampered with my honour, paltered with
the truth, and broken what I felt to be a peremptory and inviolable
duty. Let it be for ever remembered, that once acknowledge and ascertain
that a principle is publicly good, and no possible private motive should
ever induce you to depart from it.

It was with a heightened pulse, and a burning cheek, that I entered
London; before midnight I was in a high fever; they sent for the
vultures of physic--I was bled copiously--I was kept quiet in bed for
six days, at the end of that time, my constitution and youth restored
me. I took up one of the newspapers listlessly: Glanville's name struck
me; I read the paragraph which contained it--it was a high-flown and
fustian panegyric on his genius and promise. I turned to another column,
it contained a long speech he had the night before made in the House of
Commons.

"Can such things be?" thought I; yea, and thereby hangs a secret and an
anomaly in the human heart. A man may commit the greatest of crimes, and
(if no other succeed