xpected each moment to see Travers take his departure. Now he hurried
eagerly onward, as if to reach some destined spot--now he would stop,
and retrace his steps, irresolutely, as though half determined to return
home.

"Degraded, insulted, outraged on the very hearth of my father's house!"
cried he, aloud, as he wrung his hands in agony, and gave his passion
vent. Again he pressed forward, and at last arrived at that part of the
glen, where the road seems escarped between the two mountains, which
rise several hundred feet, like walls, on either side. Here he paused,
and after examining the spot for some seconds, he muttered to himself,
"He has no choice here, but stand or turn!" and so saying, he drew from
the breast of his coat two pistols, examined the priming of each, and
then replaced them. The prospect of speedy revenge seemed to have
calmed his vindictive spirit, for now he continued to walk backwards
and forwards, at a slow pace, like a sentinel on his post, pausing
occasionally to listen if a horse's hoofs could be heard upon the road,
and then resuming his walk once more. A rustling sound in the brushwood
above his head once startled him, but the granite cliffs that overhung
the road prevented his seeing from what it proceeded, and his heart was
now bent on a very different object than the pursuit of the deer. At
that moment, the proudest of the herd might have grazed in safety,
within pistol-shot of him, and he had not deigned to notice it. Thus
passed an hour--a second--and a third succeeded--and, already, the dull
shadows of approaching night were falling--yet, no one came. Tortured
with strange conjectures, Mark saw the day waning, and yet no sight nor
sound of him he looked for. Let not poets speak of the ardent longing of
a lover's heart, as in throbbing eagerness he waits for her, whose smile
is life and hope, and heaven. Compared with the mad impatience of him
who thirsts for vengeance, his passion is but sluggish apathy. It is the
bad, that ever calls forth the sternest energies of human nature. It is
in crime, that men transcend the common attributes of mankind. Here was
one, now, who would have given his right hand beneath the axe, for
but one brief moment of vengeance, and have deemed years of suffering
cheaply bought, for the mere presence of his enemy before him.

"He must have guessed my meaning when I left the room;" was the taunting
expression he now uttered, as his unsated anger took the shap