you could not help meeting them--there was
no other road they could take."

"Sorra man, woman, or child I seen, your honour, since I left home, and
that's eight miles from this," and so saying he followed his journey,
leaving Mark in greater bewilderment than before.

CHAPTER XIII. THE GUARDSMAN

Leaving for a brief season Glenflesk and its inhabitants, we shall ask
of our readers to accompany us to London, to a scene somewhat different
from that of our last chapter.

In a handsomely furnished drawing-room in St. James's street, where the
appliances of ease and luxury were blended with the evidence of those
tastes so popular among young men of fashion of the period, sat, or
rather lay, in a deep cushioned arm-chair, a young officer, who, even
in the dishabille of the morning, and with the evident traces of fatigue
and dissipation on his brow, was strikingly handsome. Though not more
than three or four-and-twenty, the habits of his life, and the assured
features of his character, made him appear several years older. In
figure he was tall and well-proportioned, while his countenance
bore those lineaments which are pre-eminently distinguished as
Saxon,--massive but well-chiselled features, the harmony of whose
expression is even more striking than their individual excellence,
a look of frank daring, which many were prone to attribute to
superciliousness, was the most marked trait in his face, nor was the
impression lessened by a certain "_hauteur_," which military men of the
time assumed, and which, he, in particular, somewhat prided himself on.

The gifts of fortune and the graces of person will often seem to invest
their possessor with attributes of insolence and overbearing, which are,
in reality, nothing more than the unbridled buoyancy of youth and power
revelling in its own exercise.

We have no fancy to practise mystery with our reader, and shall at
once introduce him to Frederick Travers, Sir Marmaduke's only son, and
Captain in the first regiment of Guards. Wealth and good looks were
about as popular fifty years ago, as they are in the year we write in,
and Frederick Travers was as universal a favorite in the circles he
frequented as any man of his day. Courtly manners, spirits nothing could
depress, a courage nothing could daunt, expensive tastes, gratified as
rapidly as they were conceived, were all accessaries which won their
way among his acquaintances, and made them proud of his intimacy, and
boa