t a point about eight miles from the castle, at which the road strikes
through a desolate and heathy flat, sloping up distantly at either side
into bleak undulatory hills, in whose monotonous sweep the imagination
beholds the heaving of some dark sluggish sea, arrested in its first
commotion by some preternatural power. It is a gloomy and divested spot;
there is neither tree nor habitation near it; its monotony is unbroken,
except by here and there the grey front of a rock peering above the
heath, and the effect is rendered yet more dreary and spectral by the
exaggerated and misty shadows which the moon casts along the sloping
sides of the hills.

When they had gained about the centre of this tract, Carlton, the
coachman, was surprised to see a figure standing at some distance in
advance, immediately beside the road, and still more so when, on coming
up, he observed that it was no other than Jacque whom he believed to be
at that moment quietly seated in the carriage; the coachman drew up, and
nodding to him, the little valet exclaimed:

'Carlton, I have got the start of you; the roads are heavy, so I shall
even take care of myself the rest of the way. Do you make your way back
as best you can, and I shall follow my own nose.'

So saying, he chucked a purse into the lap of the coachman, and turning
off at a right angle with the road, he began to move rapidly away in the
direction of the dark ridge that lowered in the distance.

The servant watched him until he was lost in the shadowy haze of night;
and neither he nor any of the inmates of the castle saw Jacque again.
His disappearance, as might have been expected, did not cause any regret
among the servants and dependants at the castle; and Lady Ardagh did
not attempt to conceal her delight; but with Sir Robert matters were
different, for two or three days subsequent to this event he confined
himself to his room, and when he did return to his ordinary occupations,
it was with a gloomy indifference, which showed that he did so more
from habit than from any interest he felt in them. He appeared from that
moment unaccountably and strikingly changed, and thenceforward walked
through life as a thing from which he could derive neither profit nor
pleasure. His temper, however, so far from growing wayward or morose,
became, though gloomy, very--almost unnaturally--placid and cold; but
his spirits totally failed, and he grew silent and abstracted.

These sombre habits of mind