! And yet, fool that I am! I cannot
leave this country without seeing her again, without telling her that I
have really looked my last. But have I not twice told her that? Strange
fatality! But twice have I spoken to her of love, and each time it was
to tear myself from her at the moment of my confession. And even now
something that I have no power to resist compels me to the same idle and
weak indulgence. Does destiny urge me? Ay, perhaps to my destruction!
Every hour a thousand deaths encompass me. I have now obtained all for
which I seemed to linger. I have won, by a new crime, enough to bear me
to another land, and to provide me there a soldier's destiny. I should
not lose an hour in flight, yet I rush into the nest of my enemies, only
for one unavailing word with her; and this, too, after I have already
bade her farewell! Is this fate? If it be so, what matters it? I no
longer care for a life which, after all, I should reform in vain if I
could not reform it for her; yet--yet, selfish and lost that I am!
will it be nothing to think hereafter that I have redeemed her from the
disgrace of having loved an outcast and a felon? If I can obtain honour,
will it not, in my own heart at least,--will it not reflect, however
dimly and distantly, upon her?"

Such, bewildered, unsatisfactory, yet still steeped in the colours
of that true love which raises even the lowest, were the midnight
meditations of Clifford; they terminated, towards the morning, in an
uneasy and fitful slumber. From this he was awakened by a loud yawn from
the throat of Long Ned, who was always the earliest riser of his set.

"Hullo!" said he, "it is almost daybreak; and if we want to cash our
notes and to move the old lord's jewels, we should already be on the
start."

"A plague on you!" said Tomlinson, from under cover of his woollen
nightcap; "it was but this instant that I was dreaming you were going to
be hanged, and now you wake me in the pleasantest part of the dream!"

"You be shot!" said Ned, turning one leg out of bed; "by the by, you
took more than your share last night, for you owed me three guineas
for our last game at cribbage! You'll please to pay me before we part
to-day: short accounts make long friends!"

"However true that maxim may be," returned Tomlinson, "I know one much
truer,--namely, long friends will make short accounts! You must ask Jack
Ketch this day month if I'm wrong!"

"That's what you call wit, I suppose!" retorted N