Throwing a large cloak over his brilliant dress, Linton made his way by many a by-stair and obscure passage to the back of the theatre, by which the secret approach led to Cashel's dressing-room. Often as he had trod that way before, never had he done so in the same state of intense excitement. With the loss of the papers, he saw before him not alone the defeat of every hope he nurtured, but discovery, shame, and ruin! He whose whole game in life was to wield power over others, now saw himself in the grasp of some one, to whom he had not the slightest clew. At one moment his suspicions pointed to Cashel himself, then to Tiernay, and lastly to Phillis. Possibly rage has no bitterer moment than that in which an habitual deceiver of others first finds himself in the toils of treachery. There was over his mind, besides, that superstitious terror that to unbelieving intellects stands in place of religion, which told him that luck had turned with him; that fortune, so long favorable, had changed at last; and that, in his own phrase, “the run had set in against him.” Now a half-muttered curse would burst from his lips over the foolhardiness that had made him so dilatory, and not suffered him to reap the harvest when it was ripe; now a deep-breathed vow, that if fate were propitious once again, no matter bow short the interval, he would strike his blow, come what might of it Sometimes he blamed himself for having deserted the safe and easy road to ruin by play, for the ambitious course he had followed; at other times he inveighed against his folly for not carrying off Mary Leicester before Cashel had acquired any intimacy at the cottage. Burning and half-maddened with this conflict of regrets and hopes, he touched the spring, moved back the panel, and entered Cashel's room.