"My cards," said Randal to himself, as, with a deep-drawn sigh, he resumed his soliloquy, "are becoming difficult to play. On the one hand, to entangle Frank into marriage with this foreigner, the Squire would never forgive him. On the other hand, if she will not marry him without the dowry--and that depends on her brother's wedding this countrywoman--and that countrywoman be, as I surmise, Violante--and Violante be this heiress, and to be won by me! Tush, tush. Such delicate scruples in a woman so placed and so constituted as Beatrice di Negra, must be easily talked away. Nay, the loss itself of this alliance to her brother, the loss of her own dowry--the very pressure of poverty and debt--would compel her into the sole escape left to her option. I will then follow up the old plan; I will go down to Hazeldean, and see if there be any substance in the new one; and then to reconcile both--aha--the House of Leslie shall rise yet from its ruin--and--" Here he was startled from his reverie by a friendly slap on the shoulder, and an exclamation--"Why, Randal, you are more absent than when you used to steal away from the cricket-ground, muttering Greek verses at Eton." "My dear Frank," said Randal, "you--you are so _brusque_, and I was just thinking of you." "Were you? And kindly, then, I am sure," said Frank Hazeldean, his honest, handsome face lighted up with the unsuspecting genial trust of friendship; "and heaven knows," he added, with a sadder voice, and a graver expression on his eye and lip--"Heaven knows I want all the kindness you can give me!" "I thought," said Randal, "that your father's last supply, of which I was fortunate enough to be the bearer, would clear off your more pressing debts. I don't pretend to preach, but really I must say once more, you should not be so extravagant." FRANK (seriously).--"I have done my best to reform. I have sold off my horses, and I have not touched dice nor card these six months; I would not even put into the raffle for the last Derby." This last was said with the air of a man who doubted the possibility of obtaining belief to some assertion of preternatural abstinence and virtue. RANDAL.--"Is it possible? But, with such self-conquest, how is it that you can not contrive to live within the bounds of a very liberal allowance?" FRANK (despondingly).--"Why, when a man once gets his head under water, it is so hard to float back again on the surface. You see, I attribute all my embarrassments to that first concealment of my debts from my father, when they could have been so easily met, and when he came up to town so kindly." "I am sorry, then, that I gave you that advice." "Oh, you meant it so kindly, I don't reproach you; it was all my own fault." "Why, indeed, I did urge you to pay off that moiety of your debts left unpaid, with your allowance. Had you done so, all had been well."