rdial welcome at an inn, but curse me if it shall
purchase him a reception here."

He again opened and glanced through the letter.

"Aye, purposely put in such a way that I can't decline it without
affronting him," he continued doggedly. "Well, then, he has no one to
blame but himself--affronted he shall be; I shall effectually put an end
to this humorous excursion. Egad, it is rather hard if a man cannot keep
his poverty to himself."

Sir Wynston Berkley was a baronet of large fortune--a selfish,
fashionable man, and an inveterate bachelor. He and Marston had been
schoolfellows, and the violent and implacable temper of the latter had as
little impressed his companion with feelings of regard, as the frivolity
and selfishness of the baronet had won the esteem of his relative. As
boys, they had little in common upon which to rest the basis of a
friendship, or even a mutual liking. Berkley was gay, cold, and
satirical; his cousin--for cousins they were--was jealous, haughty, and
relentless. Their negative disinclination to one another's society, not
unnaturally engendered by uncongenial and unamiable dispositions, had for
a time given place to actual hostility, while the two young men were at
Oxford. In some intrigue, Marston discovered in his cousin a
too-successful rival; the consequence was, a bitter and furious quarrel,
which, but for the prompt and peremptory interference of friends, Marston
would undoubtedly have pushed to a bloody issue. Time had, however,
healed this rupture, and the young men came to regard one another with
the same feelings, and eventually to re-establish the same sort of cold
and indifferent intimacy which had subsisted between them before their
angry collision.

Under these circumstances, whatever suspicion Marston might have felt on
the receipt of the unexpected, and indeed unaccountable proposal, which had
just reached him, he certainly had little reason to complain of any
violation of early friendship in the neglect with which Sir Wynston had
hitherto treated him. In deciding to decline his proposed visit, however,
Marston had not consulted the impulses of spite or anger. He knew the
baronet well; he knew that he cherished no good will towards him, and
that in the project which he had thus unexpectedly broached, whatever
indirect or selfish schemes might possibly be at the bottom of it, no
friendly feeling had ever mingled. He was therefore resolved to avoid the
trouble and the expense o