If that be your regret, resumed De Lancaster, dismiss it from your mind at once. Philip is made at all points for your daughter: no couple can be better paired. Fondness on either side would destroy their mutual tranquillity. They have given us, under Providence, a grandson, and if that blessing be continued to us, you and I must agree to regard the intermediate generation as a blank, and rest our only hope on what that child may be. Heaven grant him life, cried Morgan! You have cured me of the mournfuls. Let us join our friends. CHAPTER II. _Robert De Lancaster returns to Kray-Castle. Another Visit is in Meditation._ As the porter, who lays down his burden and his knot, has probably a quicker sense, and greater relish for the pleasure, which that relaxation gives, than the gentleman, who never carried any thing heavier than the coat upon his back, so did it fare with the good old lord paramount of the manor of Glen-Morgan. He was just now the lightest man in the company, forasmuch as he had got rid of a heavy wallet of vexations, and in the gaiety of his heart, he declared, that as for any pain the gout could give (which in fact at that very moment gave no pain at all) he regarded it as nothing: a man was not to flinch and make wry faces at a little twinge of the toe, when he had a gallant officer in his eye, who had undergone the amputation of a leg. Yes, said the colonel, I have lost one leg; I should not like to lose another; but in our way of life we must take things as they turn out; considering how often I have heard the bullets whistle, I think myself well off. I perceive, cried the painter, it is your right leg, colonel, which you have lost: the misfortune I should think would have been greater, had you been deprived of your right arm. So the world would think, sir, replied the colonel, had it been your case; but we poor soldiers sometimes want our legs to save our lives. Your wounds sometimes, said De Lancaster, will save your lives: the scars, that Caius Marius bore about him, rendered his visage so terrible, that the assassinating soldier did not dare to strike him.--I have painted him in that very crisis, replied the artist; but I confess I have trusted to his natural expression, and left out the scars.--You have done right as a painter, rejoined De Lancaster; an historian is tied down to facts.