ore than doubtful.

Wherever Cashel turned, desertion and desolation met him; and the
cutting question that ever recurred to his mind was, "Is this _my_
doing? Are these the consequences of _my_ folly?" The looks of the
villagers seemed to tally with the accusation, as in cold respect they
touched their hats as he passed, but never spoke: "not one said God
bless him."

He twice set out for the cottage, and twice turned back,--his over-full
heart almost choked with emotion. The very path that led thither
reminded him too fully of the past, and he turned from it into the wood,
to wander about for hours long, lost in thought.

He sought and found relief in planning out something for his future
life. The discovery of the murderer--the clearing up of the terrible
mystery that involved that crime--had become a duty, and he resolved to
apply himself to it steadily and determinedly. His unacquitted debt
of vengeance on Linton, too, was not forgotten. These accomplished, he
resolved again to betake himself to the "new world beyond seas." Wealth
had become distasteful to him; it was associated with all that lowered
and humiliated him. He felt that with poverty his manly reliance, his
courageous daring to confront danger, would return,--that once more upon
the wild prairie, or the blue waters of the Pacific, he would grow young
of heart, and high in spirit, forgetting the puerile follies into which
a life of affluence had led him. "Would that I could believe it all a
dream!" thought he. "Would that this whole year were but a vision, and
that I could go back to what I once was, even as 'the buccaneer,' they
called me!"

His last hours in Tubbermore were spent in arrangements that showed he
never intended to return there. His household was all discharged; his
equipages and horses despatched to the capital to be sold; his books,
his plate, and all that was valuable in furniture, were ordered to
be packed up, and transmitted to Dublin. He felt a kind of malicious
pleasure in erasing and effacing, as it were, every trace of the last
few months.

"I will leave it," muttered he, "to become the wreck I found it--would
that I could be what I was ere I knew it!"

The following day he left Tubbermore forever, and set out for Dublin.

CHAPTER XXXII. ON THE TRACK

"And with a sleuth-hound's scent,
Smells blood afar!"

It was nightfall when Roland Cashel entered Dublin. The stir and
movement of the day were over,