l, I leave it to you to propitiate the cove or not, as you please;
and now that we have settled the main point, let us finish the lush!"

"And," added Augustus, taking a pack of cards from the chimney-piece,
"we can in the mean while have a quiet game at cribbage for shillings."

"Done!" cried Ned, clearing away the dessert.

If the redoubted hearts of Mr. Edward Pepper, and that Ulysses of
robbers, Augustus Tomlinson, beat high as the hours brought on Lord
Mauleverer's fete, their leader was not without anxiety and expectation
for the same event. He was uninvited, it is true, to the gay scene;
but he had heard in public that Miss Brandon, recovered from her late
illness, was certainly to be there; and Clifford, torn with suspense,
and eager once more, even if for the last time, to see the only person
who had ever pierced his soul with a keen sense of his errors or crimes,
resolved to risk all obstacles and meet her at Mauleverer's.

"My life," said he, as he sat alone in his apartment, eying the
falling embers of his still and lethargic fire, "may soon approach its
termination; it is, indeed, out of the chances of things that I can
long escape the doom of my condition; and when, as a last hope to raise
myself from my desperate state into respectability and reform, I came
hither, and meditated purchasing independence by marriage, I was
blind to the cursed rascality of the action! Happy, after all, that my
intentions were directed against one whom I so soon and so adoringly
learned to love! Had I wooed one whom I loved less, I might not have
scrupled to deceive her into marriage. As it is,--well, it is idle in
me to think thus of my resolution, when I have not even the option to
choose; when her father, perhaps, has already lifted the veil from my
assumed dignities, and the daughter already shrinks in horror from my
name. Yet I will see her! I will look once more upon that angel face, I
will hear from her own lips the confession of her scorn, I will see that
bright eye flash hatred upon me, and I can then turn once more to my
fatal career, and forget that I have ever repented that it was begun.
Yet, what else could have been my alternative? Friendless, homeless,
nameless,--an orphan, worse than an orphan,--the son of a harlot, my
father even unknown; yet cursed with early aspirings and restlessness,
and a half glimmering of knowledge, and an entire lust of whatever
seemed enterprise,--what wonder that I chose anything