These tidings were balm to the hearts of Sir Sidney and Blanche Delaware, but were not quite so pleasing to the people of Emberton, who next to a murder enjoyed a hanging--which, indeed, is generally much the same thing. Another messenger, however, arrived about the same time, who brought news which somewhat diverted their attention. This was the man who had been sent the day before to London, by Dr. Wilton, in search of Mr. Beauchamp, and who was a shrewd intelligent fellow, not likely to miss the track of any one he sought for. But the tidings he brought back imported, that Mr. Beauchamp had never reached his house in town; and that, along the whole line of road, no person resembling him had either fed a horse, taken a post-chaise, mounted a stage, or entered an inn for the last four days. Every one opened their eyes; and the people of Emberton all went to bed with the consolatory reflection that Mr. Beauchamp, or rather Mr. Burrel, as they termed him, must undoubtedly have been murdered also. Dr. Wilton was himself uneasy. Sir Sidney Delaware said that the absence of Henry Beauchamp was most unfortunate on many accounts; but Blanche turned deadly pale when she heard the tidings, and the vague apprehensions by which they were accompanied; and it would require no great skill in the book of the human heart to read the silent commentary that went on in her own bosom, on the unexplained absence of one she dearly loved. CHAPTER X. Exactly three days after the arrival of Mr. Peter Tims at Emberton, and the discovery of his uncle's murder, the Right Honourable the Earl of Ashborough was sitting at his breakfast-table, in his house of Parmouth Hall, in the county of ----. It was a rainy morning, and over the whole face of the country there was a dim sort of ground-glass haze, which cut off all the far prospect from view, leaving even those objects that were near, nothing but an indistinct aspect of drippingness, not at all consolatory to those who had laid out their expeditions for the day. Though a very regular man in his habits, Lord Ashborough had a notion that fires were made to warm people, and that people might very well be cold in the beginning of October, so that, in addition to the glossy damask, and the splendid china, and the burnished silver, and all those other things, which, as we have before observed, make an English breakfast something far superior to any other meal eaten in any other place in the world, there was the bright and blazing fire in the polished grate, setting itself up in eternal opposition to the rain without.