"Is it generous thus to trample on a fallen man? You can see--all who ever met me before I left England, can see how much I have changed by these cursed months in the deadly swamps, and the pestiferous hospital, not to speak of the wounds which reduced me to a skeleton, and aged me, as five years would have failed to do. All this tells upon a man's spirits, Miss Walsingham; and I am quite ready to confess that I have lost much of my bravado, and my insolent manner of riding on fortune's neck, as if I could ever expect to stay there." "You speak as bitterly of yourself, as if you were your bitterest enemy!" The colonel looked up at the dim sky with that hooded stare of his. "I have been my own bitterest enemy, I fear. If I had been less insolent, less arrogant and sneering," with a dark look of hatred up at the sky, "I might have been the heir of Seven Oak Waaste at this present moment, instead--of where I am." Margaret looked at him in a sort of horrified fascination. That he was carried out of himself and spoke of the dead, she was dimly conscious; that the malevolent power which brought him here as a suitor, might also make him master, became to her dimly conscious too. She trembled before the depths of a hideous possibility. "But about this letter," said Colonel Brand, coming again out of his fog, and smoothing the ugly seams out of his face. "I do not feel inclined to leave the subject until I have set myself in at least a more tolerable light before your eyes." He pulled his handkerchief with a flourish out of his pocket, to flick a cobweb off Margaret's sleeve, which she had brushed from a bush twenty minutes since, and as he did so, a small note-book fell to the ground. Why had he not brushed the cobweb off before? "I am sure that you will acknowledge that under the circumstances,"--here he stopped to pick up the note-book--"disappointment might drive me to say anything,"--he idly leafed over the book as if searching for something--"and I was really so astonished at my grandmother's will that surprise seemed to take away my senses. The idea of insinuating that you had stepped in fraudulently, and been the parasite which chocked her! And that allusion to Paolo Orsini strangling his wife--upon my honor as a gentleman, I humbly beg your pardon! Ah, that is what I was looking for, the autograph of General McClellan. Can you read characters by writing, or do you care to examine it, Miss Walsingham?" She took the book from him at arm's length, and looked silently at the name. "The General wrote that in my memorandum-book as a password on one occasion when I was on a secret embassy. The rough scrawl has often saved my life since." Margaret shut the memorandum-book, looked carefully at each cover, and handed it back.