"Go on, William!" said Sir Philip fiercely, for his suspicions were now assuming a bodily form; and it was with anger gathering in his breast that he sat there thinking--knowing, too, the goal to which to shape his course. But he said no word to Mr Bray, only sat down now, with his brow knit, as he felt the impossibility of overtaking the other carriage; but from time to time he started up impatiently, to urge the coachman to renewed efforts; so that whenever a plain hard piece of road presented itself, the horses appeared almost to fly. Shame and disgrace seemed to Sir Philip to have marked him for their own; and he shrank from his companion, dreading, after awhile, to hear him speak; for his son's acts were as his own; nay, he felt that they would fall upon him more heavily. It was cruel, cruel, cruel; or was he mad? Impossible! But what could he do, what could he say? "Wait awhile," he muttered at last; and then, starting up once more, he ordered the coachman to drive faster. And onward they tore, till the carriage jolted here and there, and the springs threatened to snap; but Sir Philip heeded nothing but his own thoughts, as his heart asked him where was his son. A question that he could have answered again and again, as his brow grew more deeply marked with the anger and shame that oppressed him; but he forbore. "Quicker, William, quicker!" exclaimed Sir Philip at last; and the coachman lashed the horses into a gallop, but only to hasten the catastrophe that had been predicted for the chariot; for, as the horses sprang forward, and the barouche swayed again with the speed, there was a sharp crack, a swerve, a crash, and the handsome carriage was over, with the horses kicking madly, and the driver and occupants lying stunned and senseless in the muddy road. Volume 3, Chapter XII. GOING BACK. As the old novelists used to say, in their courtly polished style, that makes us think that they must have written with a handsome bead-work presentation pen dipped in scented ink, and held by a delicate hand clothed in a white-kid glove, "Gentle reader, we must now return to our heroine." In the plain English and more matter-of-fact way of the year of grace eighteen hundred and seventy, it is given to my hard steel broad-point to be dipped in the ordinary infusion of galls and copperas--rather bitty by the way, and given to turn mouldy--and then, when well-charged with the ink-rusting fluid to declare that we have a long arrear to fetch up relative to the proceedings of Ella Bedford, which could not well be told until the career of the two country families had reached the point recorded in the last chapter.