ion, the
hour, the length of the story, the parenthetical interruptions, which,
although only bypaths, often looked exactly like the high-road,
and probably, too, certain inaccuracies in the adjustment of
the ear-trumpet, which grew to be very difficult at last, all
contributed,--more or less, to a mystification which finally resembled
nothing so much as a very confused dream.

Had the worthy ex-Consul then been put on his oath, he could n't have
said whether or not Sir Stafford had murdered the late Mr. Godfrey, or
if that crime should be attributed to Dalton's late wife. Between Sir
Gilbert Stafford and Sir Stafford Onslow, he had a vague suspicion of
some Siamese bond of union, but that they were cut asunder late in life,
and were now drifting in different currents, he also surmised. But which
of them "got the fortune," and which had not, who held the estate at
present, and how Dalton came to be there at that moment relating the
story, were Chinese puzzles to him.

Murder, matrimony, debts, difficulties, and Chancery suits danced an
infernal reel through his brain; and, what with the scattered fragments
of Irish life thrown in incidentally, of locking dinner-parties in, and
barring the sheriff out, of being chased by bailiffs, or hunting
them, all these divertissements ending in a residence abroad, with its
manifold discomforts and incongruities, poor Foglass was in a state
which, were it only to be permanent, would have presented a spectacle of
very lamentable insanity.

The nearest approach to a fact that he could come to was that Dalton
ought to be enormously rich, and that now he hadn't a sixpence; that the
wealthy banker was somehow the cause, Count Stephen being not altogether
blameless; and that Kate was living a life of extravagance and waste,
while her father and sister were waging a hard fight with the very
"grimmest" of poverty.

"L'homme propose," &c., says the adage; and the poet tells us an
instance, that "those who came to scoff remained to pray." So in the
present case, Mr. Foglass, whose mission was to pump Peter Dalton out
of every family secret and circumstance, had opened such an unexpected
stream of intelligence upon himself that he was actually carried away in
the flood.

"You've been badly used, Dalton," said he, at last. "I may say,
infamously treated! Not only your fortune taken away, but your children
torn from you!"

"Ay, just so." Dalton liked sympathy too well to cavil about his t