raversed, and since the Corporal took care that they should remain some
hours in the place where they dined, night fell upon them as they found
themselves in the midst of the same long and dreary stage in which they
had encountered Sir Peter Hales and the two suspected highwaymen.

Walter's mind was full of the project on which he was bent. The reader
can fully comprehend how vivid must have been his emotions at thus
chancing on what might prove a clue to the mystery that hung over
his father's fate; and sanguinely did he now indulge those intense
meditations with which the imaginative minds of the young always
brood over every more favourite idea, until they exalt the hope into a
passion. Every thing connected with this strange and roving parent,
had possessed for the breast of his son, not only an anxious, but so
to speak, indulgent interest. The judgment of a young man is always
inclined to sympathize with the wilder and more enterprising order of
spirits; and Walter had been at no loss for secret excuses wherewith to
defend the irregular life and reckless habits of his parent. Amidst all
his father's evident and utter want of principle, Walter clung with a
natural and self-deceptive partiality to the few traits of courage or
generosity which relieved, if they did not redeem, his character; traits
which, with a character of that stamp, are so often, though always so
unprofitably blended, and which generally cease with the commencement
of age. He now felt elated by the conviction, as he had always been
inspired by the hope, that it was to be his lot to discover one whom
he still believed living, and whom he trusted to find amended. The same
intimate persuasion of the "good luck" of Geoffrey Lester, which all who
had known him appeared to entertain, was felt even in a more credulous
and earnest degree by his son. Walter gave way now, indeed, to a variety
of conjectures as to the motives which could have induced his father to
persist in the concealment of his fate after his return to England; but
such of those conjectures as, if the more rational, were also the more
despondent, he speedily and resolutely dismissed. Sometimes he thought
that his father, on learning the death of the wife he had abandoned,
might have been possessed with a remorse which rendered him unwilling to
disclose himself to the rest of his family, and a feeling that the main
tie of home was broken; sometimes he thought that the wanderer had been
disa