lt of all his varied gifts and accomplishments was only
to make up such a being as he was, then would he welcome the most
unlettered and uninformed clown that ever walked, rather than this mass
of conceit and self-sufficiency.

He sat down to commit these thoughts to paper, and though he scrawled
over seven sheets in the attempt, nothing but failure came of it.
Maitland came in, if not by name, by insinuation, everywhere; and, in
spite of himself, he found he had got into a tone not merely querulous,
but actually aggressive, and was using towards Alice an air of reproof
that he almost trembled at as he re-read it.

"This will never do," cried he, as he tore up the scribbled sheets. "I
'll wait till to-morrow, and perhaps I shall do better." When the morrow
came, he was despatched on duty, and Alice remained unanswered.

CHAPTER XXXIX. THE MAJOR'S MISSION

If my reader has been as retentive as I could wish him, he will have
borne in mind that on the evening when Major M'Caskey took a very
menacing leave of Norman Maitland at Paris, Count Caffarelli had
promised his friend to write to General Filangieri to obtain from the
King a letter addressed to Maitland in the royal hand by the title
of Count of Amalfi,--such a recognition being as valid an act of
ennoblement as all the declarations and registrations and emblazonments
of heralds and the colleges.

It had been originally intended that this letter should be enclosed to
Count Ludolf, the Neapolitan envoy at Turin, where Maitland would have
found it; but seeing the spirit which had now grown up between Maitland
and M'Caskey, and foreseeing well what would occur whenever these two
men should meet, Caffarelli, with that astuteness that never fails the
Italian, determined to avert the peril by a stratagem which lent its aid
to the object he had in hand. He begged the General would transmit the
letter from the King, not to Turin, but to the Castello di Montanara,
where Maitland had long resided, in a far-away part of Calabria, and
employ as the messenger M'Caskey himself; by which means this very
irritable and irritating individual might be, for a time at least,
withdrawn from public view, and an immediate meeting with Maitland
prevented.

It was not very difficult, without any breach of confidence, for
Caffarelli to convey to Filangieri that his choice of M'Caskey for this
mission was something stronger than a caprice, and that his real wish
was that this fiery pe