It was maddening even for one so cold in blood--so cautious and so slimy in his proceedings, as Mr. Downie Trevelyan. He had no great talents, but only instinct and cunning; barrister though he was, the cunning of the pettifogger. A legal education had developed all that were corrupt and vile in his nature. A country squire, Downie would have been a blackleg on the turf and a grinding landlord; a tradesman, he would have been far from being an honest one; a soldier, he might have been a poltroon and a malingerer; a legal man, he was--exactly what we find him, a master in subtlety, with a heart of stone. In the same luxurious chair in which he was now seated in fierce and bitter reverie, he had sat and regarded his brother's widow, in her pale and picturesque beauty, and watched the torture of her heart with something of the half amused expression of a cat when playing with the poor little mouse of which it intends to make a repast; and now he sat there shrinking from vague terrors of the future, and in abhorrence of suspense; but there was a species of dogged courage which he could summon to meet any legal emergency or danger, if he would but know its full extent. He was in the dark as yet, and his heart writhed within him at the prospect of coming peril, even as that of Constance had been wrung by the emotions of sorrow and unmerited shame. He knew himself to be degraded by acting the part of a conspirator in all this; yet how much was at stake! No family in ancient Cornwall was older in history or tradition than his, and none was more honoured: yet here by intrigue, fatality, and the debasing influence of association was he, the twelfth Lord Lamorna, the coadjutor of a man whose father had been a poor rat-catcher, and, if report said true, a felon. He felt as if on Damien's bed of steel, or as if the velvet cushions of his chair had been stuffed with long iron nails, and he repeated bitterly aloud,-- "What! am I to be but a _locum tenens_ after all--and to whom? Denzil Devereaux--this _filius nullius_, this son of an adventuress, or of nobody perhaps!" The grave, grim, and somewhat grotesque portraits of Launcelot, Lord Lamorna, in Cavalier dress--he who hid from Fairfax's troopers in the Trewoofe; of Lord Henry, with beard, ruff, and ribbed armour, who was Governor of Rougemont in Devon, and whose scruples did not find him favour with the "Virgin" Queen; and even of his late uncle, with his George IV. wig, false teeth, and brass-buttoned blue swallow-tail, seemed to look coldly and contemptuously down on him. "Pshaw!" muttered Downie, "am I a fool or a child to be swayed by such fancies?--I should think not; the days of superstition are gone!" Yet he felt an influence, or something, he knew not what, and averted his stealthy eyes from the painted faces of the honester dead.