, when you drove at an unseasonable hour to
the town of------? Now, sir, I use your words, on _that_ subject, to
_your own knowledge_ I beg most respectfully to refer you. I have done."

Sir Thomas Gourlay, when effort was necessary, could certainly play an
able and adroit part. There was not a charge brought against him in
the preceding conference that did not sink his heart into the deepest
dismay; yet did he contrive to throw over his whole manner and bearing
such a veil of cold, hard dissimulation as it was nearly impossible
to penetrate. It is true, he saw that he had an acute, sensible,
independent man to deal with, whose keen eye he felt was reading every
feature of his face, and every motion of his body, and weighing, as
it were, with a practised hand, the force and import of every word he
uttered. He knew that merely to entertain the subject, or to discuss it
at all with anything like seriousness, would probably have exposed him
to the risk of losing his temper, and thus placed himself in the power
of so sharp and impurturbable an antagonist. As the dialogue proceeded,
too, a portion of his attention was transferred from the topic in
question to the individual who introduced it. His language, his manner,
his dress, his _tout ensemble_ were unquestionably not only those of an
educated gentleman, but of a man who was well acquainted with life and
society, and who appeared to speak as if he possessed no unequivocal
position in both.

"Who the devil," thought he to himself several times, "can this person
be? How does he come to speak on behalf of Lady Gourlay? Surely such a
man cannot be a brush manufacturer's clerk--and he has very little the
look of an impostor, too."

All this, however, could not free him from the deep and deadly
conviction that the friends of his brother's widow were on his trail,
and that it required the whole united powers of his faculties for
deception, able and manifold as they were, to check his pursuers and
throw them off the scent. It was now, too, that his indignation against
his daughter and him who had seduced her from his roof began to deepen
in his heart. Had he succeeded in seeing her united to Lord Dunroe,
previous to any exposure of himself--supposing even that discovery
was possible--his end, the great object of his life, was, to a certain
extent, gained. Now, however, that that hope was out of the question,
and treachery evidently at work against him, he felt that gloom,
dis