Fairfax, I came upon them!--By surprise!--My alert and watchful spirit, an adept in such arts, accustomed to them, and rendered suspicious by practice and experience, foreboded some such possibility--My knock at the door was counterfeit. I strode up stairs to the drawing-room, three steps at a time--Swiftly and suddenly--I opened the door--There they sat!--Alone!--She singing a miserable ditty, a bead-roll of lamentable rhymes, strung together by this Quidam!--This Henley!--Nay!--Oh!--Damnation!--Read and tremble!--Read and aid me to curse!--Set by her!--Ay!--A ballad--A love complaint--A most doleful woe-begone elegy; of sorrows, sufferings, fate, despair, and death; scribbled by him, and set and sung by her!--By her!--For his comfort, his solace, his pleasure, his diversion!--I caught them at it!--Nay they defied me, despised the wrath that drank up the moisture of my eyes, blazed in my blood, and scorched my very soul!-- And after this will I blench? Will I recant the denunciations which legitimate vengeance had pronounced?-- Fairfax--I am not certain that I do not hate her!--No!--Angelic sorceress!--It is not hatred, neither--But it is a tumult, a congregate anarchy of feelings which I cannot unravel; except that the first feature of them is revenge!--Roused and insulted as I am, not all her blandishments can dazzle, divert, or melt me! Were mountains to be moved, dragons to be slain, or lakes of liquid fire to be traversed, I would encounter all to attain my end!--Yes--My romance shall equal hers. No epic hero, not Orpheus, Aeneas, or Milton's Lucifer himself, was ever more determined. I could plunge into Erebus, and give battle to the legion phantoms of hell, to accomplish my fixed purpose!--Fixed!--Fixed!--Hoot me, hiss at me, despise me if I turn recreant! No--Then may all who ever heard the name of Coke Clifton make it their byword and their scoff; and every idiot curl the nose and snuff me to scorn!