"What the deuce can be the secret spring of all this intrusive solicitude upon my uncle's part about having me married, as if I were a young girl in her third season?" he muttered; "I have often feared that Downie suspected me--as a lawyer, it is natural he should suspect every one of something more than he sees or knows; and yet--I have been so wary, so careful! My poor Constance--still concealment--still dissimulation for the present, and doubts of our future! No hope for us, save in the death of that old man, ever so good and kind to me. Did he really but know Constance, how sweet and gentle she is! A curse be on this silly pride of birth and fortuitous position which is our bane--this boasting of pedigree old as the days of Bran ap Llyr, the ancestor of King Arthur. By Jove, it is too absurd!" and he laughed angrily as he tossed away his cigar and then sighed, as he surveyed the façade of the stately mansion, and cast his eyes round the spacious lawn that stretched far away in starlight and obscurity. "And yet must I stoop to this senile folly," he added, half aloud; "for 'twere hard to see all these broad acres go to Downie's boy, the Hussar, past me and mine!" The seats of the Cornish aristocracy have usually little to boast of in architecture; but the mansion of Rhoscadzhel* was an exception, being a rare specimen of a fine old Tudor dwelling, which had suffered more from the rude hand of civil war, than from "time's effacing fingers," and was built, tradition avers, from the famous quarry of Pencarrow, and of good Cornish freestone. * Cadzhel, Cornish for castle. A massive iron gate, between carved pillars, each surmounted by a koithgath, or wild cat, rampant--a crest of which Lord Lamorna was as vain as ever was old Bradwardine of his heraldic bears--gave access to the avenue, a long and leafy tunnel that lay between the house and the highway leading to the Land's End. The branches of the stately old elms were interlaced overhead, like the groined arches of a Gothic cathedral and a delightful promenade their shade afforded in the hot days of summer, when only a patch of blue sky, or the golden rays falling aslant, could be seen at times through their foliage. Engrafted in the later Tudor times upon the ruins of Rhoscadzhel, of which there is still remaining the fragment of a loopholed tower and ponderous granite arch shrouded in ivy, with its modern _porte-cochère_ and vestibule floored with marble, its mullioned windows filled in with plate glass in lieu of little lozenge-panes, its dining hall and drawing rooms lighted with gas when such was the wish of its proprietor, the mansion, though retaining all the characteristics of the days when Queen Bess held her court at Greenwich and danced before the Scottish ambassador, had nevertheless all the comforts, appliances and splendour, with which the taste and wealth of the present age could invest it.