ead the force of thy house, the leading
shall pass to other hands, and thy inheritance shall depart from thee
like vigour and verdure from a rotten branch. For these honourable
persons, a slight condition there is which they annex to their
friendship--something so trifling that it is scarce worthy of mention.
This boon granted to them by him who is most interested, there is no
question they will take the field in the manner there stated.'

Again Darsie perused the paper, and felt himself still less inclined to
believe that so many men of family and fortune were likely to embark in
an enterprise so fatal. It seemed as if some rash plotter had put
down at a venture the names of all whom common report tainted with
Jacobitism; or if it was really the act of the individuals named, he
suspected that they must be aware of some mode of excusing themselves
from compliance with its purport. It was impossible, he thought, that
Englishmen, of large fortune, who had failed to join Charles when he
broke into England at the head of a victorious army, should have the
least thoughts of encouraging a descent when circumstances were so much
less propitious. He therefore concluded the enterprise would fall to
pieces of itself, and that his best way was, in the meantime, to remain
silent, unless the actual approach of a crisis (which might, however,
never arrive) should compel him to give a downright refusal to his
uncle's proposition; and if, in the interim, some door for escape should
be opened, he resolved within himself not to omit availing himself of
it.

Hugh Redgauntlet watched his nephew's looks for some time, and then, as
if arriving from some other process of reasoning at the same conclusion,
he said, 'I have told you, Sir Arthur, that I do not urge your immediate
accession to my proposal; indeed the consequences of a refusal would be
so dreadful to yourself, so destructive to all the hopes which I have
nursed, that I would not risk, by a moment's impatience, the object of
my whole life. Yes, Arthur, I have been a self-denying hermit at one
time--at another, the apparent associate of outlaws and desperadoes--at
another, the subordinate agent of men whom I felt in every way my
inferiors--not for any selfish purpose of my own, no, not even to win
for myself the renown of being the principal instrument in restoring
my king and freeing my country. My first wish on earth is for
that restoration and that freedom--my next, that my nephe