"I mean lying and deceit. You never loved _me_--_I_ never had that feeling for you; you have this evening shown me why you became mine. He had loved you, and then forsook--revenge dictated the act which made you give me a claim to call you mine; dislike to every thing fostering affection for that impostor and base-born hound, made me resolve to win you, and well have I succeeded! False to his affection for you, which you have confessed, and thereby made me doubly glad in having ruined you! false to me, if he so please it, I doubt not. Take back that garden key, woman, how do you know but that this impostor may some day be master here, and you require it for your secret visits to the manor-house? Verily, you love the place! feline in your affections, 'tis the place, not person, you care for!" As he concluded, he drew the deep-drawn breath of a man suffocating with overwhelming thoughts, bursting like deadly missiles from a shell, scattering death around; for, as he discharged them forth, the woman, stricken with shame and sorrow, cowered down, and buried her face in her hands. Marmaduke's deep sigh, as he concluded, was echoed by one still deeper--it was a groan, and came from the doorway leading into the dressing-room; he had but time to turn half round, when a heavy hand was on his arm. "Unsay those words, 'impostor' and 'base-born hound,'" said Miles Tremenhere ('twas he) beneath his breath; "or the world shall add the other to them, and a _true_ one, 'avenger;'--as I am a living man this night, unless you do, or you, or I shall not quit this room alive!" The presence even of that trembling woman imparted a feeling of protection to Marmaduke's coward heart. By a sudden jerk he disengaged his arm, and with one stride reached the opposite door. To think and do had been the work of an instant, the coward's self-shield through another. With a trembling hand he opened the door, and called "Viper," and the dog sprang in. No word was needed; the brave brute knew all enemies to his master, and a second spring would have brought him to Miles's throat, had that man not, foreseeing treachery, been on his guard. With one blow of his small, but muscular fist, he felled the animal, and, before it could recover itself, his hand grasped its throat; the woman shrieked--a true woman's heart is tender to every living thing. "Spare it, Miles!" she cried. "Poor, faithful brute!"