For the third time the colonel looked behind, and caught the faithful brute following him. He drew a pistol from his breast, and leveled it full at the cowering hound, which nevertheless crawled close up to him, and whined, and licked his master's foot; he shot him through the head and rode on. So his last friend fell dead by his merciless hand, his faithful serving had not availed to save him, his obedience had not helped him; when he was no longer of use to Roland Mortlake, and might be in his way, he crushed the creature that had loved him, and fled without him. At the lodge-gate he turned for the last time in his saddle, and looked at the grand old castle standing in the midst of its rich domain, and looking like a Druid rock out of the chill moonlight. A gleam of wicked envy broke from his basilisk eyes; he shook his clenched hand frantically at the stately pile, and the howl of a hungry tiger burst hoarsely from his throat. "It's mine by rights!" he cried in a frenzy, "and yet I've lost it forever! I might have been made for life, and now there's nothing left me but the chains or the gallows." He finished with a vehement volley of oaths, his wolfish face grew black with passion, his tall frame bowed upon his horse's mane in an access of abject fear, and plunging his spurs in his startled steed's flanks, he bounded away like the wind, but not on the road to Regis. Mrs. Chetwode was ringing her hands over the despoiled drawing-room, and maids were crying and whispering that the colonel had gone mad, and the men were winking shrewdly to each other in token of their belief that the colonel wasn't just what he should be, when a posse of the queen's officers appeared on the scene, demanding the person of Roland Mortlake, _alias_ St. Udo Brand. Too much disgusted with the colonel's low conduct that evening to care what scrape he had got into, the housekeeper went down to the constables, and described his proceedings with a plaintive regard to truth which met with but small favor from those functionaries. No sooner had they wrung from her a description of the clothes he departed in and from the lodge-keeper, the road he had taken, then they galloped off in chase, leaving Mrs. Chetwode in the very middle of her succinct account of the caskets and ornaments "costing no end of money, which the rogue had took off with him." Further disgusted with the unmannerly conduct of "them low-lived police," the prim housekeeper received Mr. Purcell and his news that Miss Margaret was safe home again, with elation, that she could fairly cry with joy to hear that the dear young miss was coming back, for she had feared many a time since she has gone away, that the colonel meant that she should never come back.