"May God's curse have found him!" exclaimed Rachel Liversedge fervently; "may He have avenged her wrongs upon him at last! Don't look at me, sir, as though I were a witch wishing a good man ill. I wish I were a witch. How he should pine, and rave, and writhe, and suffer ten thousand deaths in one!"

She spoke with such hate and fury, that Mr. Long involuntarily cast once more a suspicious glance around him, as though in reality she possessed the means of vengeance which she so ardently desired. "Did you expect to find him here?" continued she. "That was it, was it? I wish you had. I would that I had his fleshless bones to show you. It is not my fault that I have them not, be sure. If there were any manliness left among my people—but there is not; they are curs all—if any memory of the persecuted and the murdered had dwelt within them, as with me, let alone this work of his," she pointed to her unconscious sister, "for which, had he done nought else, I would have torn his heart out;—he would not have lived thus long by forty years. For aught we know, however, he lives yet; only hearing he was gone, we went and took my little sister from her wretchedness, and thus will keep her if you give us leave, you Christian gentlemen. Where he may be, we know not; we only hope that in some hateful spot—in hell, if such a place there be—he may be suffering unimagined pains."

The fervour and energy of her words, however reprehensible in a moral point of view, were such as left no doubt in the mind of Mr. Long that the gipsy woman spoke truth. Assuring her, therefore, that, so far as he was concerned, she should not be molested in the custody of her unfortunate sister, my tutor rode back to Fairburn, relieved from the dread burden of his late suspicion, but more at his wit's end for an elucidation of the disappearance of Sir Massingberd than ever. Right glad was I to hear that his errand among my dusky friends had been bootless; but by the next morning's post I had received bitter news from Harley Street. A copy of that menacing epistle which I had so unwittingly enclosed to Marmaduke from his uncle, reached me from Mr. Gerard. His words were kind, and intended to be comforting. He knew, of course, that I had been deceived; he well knew, and they all knew, he said, that my hand was the last to do Marmaduke hurt, to do aught but protect and uphold him. But I could see that some grievous harm had occurred, nevertheless, through me, as Sir Massingberd's catspaw. It was more apparent to me because there was not one accompanying word from my dear friend himself, whom I knew too well to imagine capable of blaming me. It was most apparent of all because of the postscript written 

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