, who was quite
satisfied with the Fawley southdowns--held in just horror all
wishy-washy light wines--and had no desire to see Darrell reduced to a
cinder for the pleasure of sprinkling that cinder with a tear.

The letter in question was addressed to Lady Montfort. Unscrupulously
violating the sacred confidence of his master, the treacherous wretch,
after accusing her, in language little more consistent with the respect
due to the fair sex than that which he had addressed to Sophy, of all
the desolation that the perfidious nuptials of Caroline Lyndsay had
brought upon Guy Darrell, declared that the least Lady Montfort could do
to repair the wrongs inflicted by Caroline Lyndsay, was--not to pity his
master!--that her pity was killing him. He repeated, with some grotesque
comments of his own, but on the whole not inaccurately, what Darrell
had said to him on the subject of her pity. He then informed her of
Darrell's consent to Lionel's marriage with Sophy; in which criminal
espousals it was clear, from Darrell's words, that Lady Montfort had had
some nefarious share. In the most lugubrious colours he brought before
her the consequences of that marriage--the extinguished name, the
demolished dwelling-place, the renunciation of native soil itself. He
called upon her, by all that was sacred, to contrive some means to undo
the terrible mischief she had originally occasioned, and had recently
helped to complete. His epistle ended by an attempt to conciliate and
coax. He revived the image of that wild Caroline Lyndsay, to whom HE
had never refused a favour; whose earliest sums he had assisted to cast
up--to whose young idea he had communicated the elementary principles
of the musical gamut--to whom he had played on his flute, winter eve
and summer noon, by the hour together; that Caroline Lyndsay, who when
a mere child, had led Guy Darrell where she willed, as by a thread of
silk. Ah, how Fairthorn had leapt for joy when, eighteen years ago, he
had thought that Caroline Lyndsay was to be the sunshine and delight of
the house to which she had lived to bring the cloud and the grief! And
by all these memories, Fairthorn conjured her either to break off the
marriage she had evidently helped to bring about, or, failing that, to
convince Guy Darrell that he was not the object of her remorseful and
affectionate compassion.

Caroline was almost beside herself at the receipt of this letter. The
picture of Guy Darrell effacing his ver