human habitation.

_Matravis_ met her.---"Flown with insolence and wine," returning home
late at night, he passed that way!

Matravis was a very ugly man. Sallow-complexioned! and if hearts can
wear that color, his heart was sallow-complexioned also.

A young man with _gray_ deliberation! cold and systematic in all his
plans; and all his plans were evil. His very lust was systematic.

He would brood over his bad purposes for such a dreary length of time
that, it might have been expected, some solitary check of conscience
must have intervened to save him from commission. But that _Light
from Heaven_ was extinct in his dark bosom.

Nothing that is great, nothing that is amiable, existed for this
unhappy man. He feared, he envied, he suspected; but he never loved.
The sublime and beautiful in nature, the excellent and becoming in
morals, were things placed beyond the capacity of his sensations. He
loved not poetry--nor ever took a lonely walk to meditate--never
beheld virtue, which he did not try to disbelieve, or female beauty
and innocence, which he did not lust to contaminate.

A sneer was perpetually upon his face, and malice _grinning_ at his
heart. He would say the most ill-natured things, with the least
remorse, of any man I ever knew. This gained him the reputation of a
wit--other _traits_ got him the reputation of a villain.

And this man formerly paid his court to Elinor Clare!--with what
success I leave my readers to determine. It was not in Elinor's
nature to despise any living thing--but in the estimation of this
man, to be rejected was to be _despised_--and Matravis _never
forgave_.

He had long turned his eyes upon Rosamund Gray. To steal from the
bosom of her friends the jewel they prized so much, the little ewe
lamb they held so dear, was a scheme of delicate revenge, and
Matravis had a twofold motive for accomplishing this young maid's
ruin.

Often had he met her in her favorite solitudes, but found her ever
cold and inaccessible. Of late the girl had avoided straying far from
her own home, in the fear of meeting him--but she had never told her
fears to Allan.

Matravis had, till now, been content to be a villain within the
limits of the law--but, on the present occasion, hot fumes of wine,
cooperating with his deep desire of revenge, and the insolence of an
unhoped-for meeting, overcame his customary prudence, and Matravis
rose, at once, to an audacity of glorious mischief.

Late at night