hank me. Here's a note from Lord Dunroe, who looks as black as
midnight."

"What! a note from Dunroe!" exclaimed Norton. "Why he only left me this
minute! What the deuce can this mean?"

He opened the note, and read, to his dismay and astonishment as follows:

"Infamous and treacherous scoundrel,--I have this moment received your
letter to Mr. Birney, enclosed by that gentleman to me, in which you
offer, for a certain sum, to betray me, by placing in the hands of my
enemies the very documents you pretended to have destroyed. I now know
the viper I have cherished--begone. You are a cheat, an impostor, and a
villain, whose name is not Norton, but Bryan, once a horse-jockey on the
Curragh, and obliged to fly the country for swindling and dishonesty.
Remove your things instantly; but that shall not prevent me from tracing
you and handing you over to justice for your knavery and fraud.

"DUNROE."

"All right! Morty---all right!" exclaimed Norton; "upon my soul, Dunroe
is too generous. You know he is going to be married to-day. Was that
Roberts who went up stairs?"

"It was the young officer, if that's his name," replied Morty.

"All right! Morty; he's to be groom's-man--that will do; this requires
no answer. The generous fellow has made me a present on his wedding-day.
That will do, Morty; you may go."

"All's discovered," he exclaimed, when Morty was gone; "however, it's
not too late: I shall give him a Roland for his Oliver before we part.
It will be no harm to give the the respectable old nobleman a hint of
what's going on, at any rate. This discovery, however, won't signify,
for I know Dunroe. The poor fool has no self-reliance; but if left to
himself would die. He possesses no manly spirit of independent will,
no firmness, no fixed principle--he is, in fact, a noun adjective, and
cannot stand alone. Depraved in his appetites and habits of life, he
cannot live without some hanger-on to enjoy his freaks of silly and
senseless profligacy, who can praise and laugh at him, and who will
act at once as his butt, his bully, his pander, and his friend; four
capacities in which I have served him--at his own expense, be it said.
No; my ascendancy over him has been too long established, and I know
that, like a prime minister who has been hastily dismissed, I shall
be ultimately recalled. And yet he is not without gleams of sense, is
occasionally sprightly, and has perceptions of principle that might have
made him a man--