Then he paused, spread them out upon his writing table, and smoothing them over, read them carefully over again. As he did so, the handsome face, the honest smile and manly figure of his brother Richard came upbraidingly to memory; there were thoughts of other and long-remembered days of happy boyhood, of their fishing, their bird-nesting expeditions, and of an old garret in which they were wont to play when the days were wet, or the snow lay deep on the hills. How was it, that, till now forgotten, the old garret roof, with its rafters big and brown, and which seemed then such a fine old place for sport, with the very sound of its echoes, and of the rain without as it came pouring down to gorge the stone gutters of the old house, came back to memory now, with Richard's face and voice, out of the mists of nearly half a century? "It was one of those flashes of the soul that for a moment unshroud to us the dark depths of the past." Thus he really wavered in purpose, and actually thought of concealing the documents in his strong box, to the end that there they might be found after his death, and after he had enjoyed the title for what remained to him of life. Would not such duplicity be unfair to his own sons, and to his daughter? was the next reflection. And if fate permitted Denzil to escape the perils of the Afghan war, was the son of that mysterious little woman, or was her daughter--the daughter of one whom he doubted not, and wished not to doubt--had entrapped his silly brother into a secret marriage, in a remote and sequestered chapel, and whose memory he actually loathed--ever to rule and reside in Rhoscadzhel? No--a thousand times no! Then muttering the lines from Shakespeare,-- "Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls. Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:" he drew near the resplendent grate of burnished steel, and resolutely casting in both documents, thrust them with the aid of the poker deep among the fuel, and they speedily perished. The deed was done, and could no more be recalled than the last year's melted snow! He watched the last sparks die out in the tinder ashes of those papers, on the preservation and production of which so much depended, so much was won and lost; and a sigh of relief was blended with his angry laugh. He felt that then, indeed, the richly carpeted floor beneath his feet; the gilded roof above his head, the sweet, soft landscape--one unusually so for bold and rugged Cornwall--that stretched away in the soft, hazy, and yellow twilight, and all that he had been on the verge of losing, were again more surely his, and the heritage of his children, and of theirs in the time to come, and that none "of Banquo's line"--none of that strange woman's blood, could ever eject them now!