"No, no, Lady Mitford," said Bligh; "he has not done that. He begged of me to come to you, and tell you that he had gone. He would not try to deceive you, he said; if he could induce her to allow him to remain with her, he would, and never return to England. Yes, indeed,--so far had his madness driven him: but at all events he would never ask you to see him again; and whatever arrangements you might choose to make, he would be quite prepared to carry into effect. He said he supposed you would not remain here." "He was mistaken," she said, very quietly and sadly; "I will remain here. Tell me what more passed between you, Captain Bligh." "Indeed, not much, dear Lady Mitford. He was dreadfully excited and wretched, and looked fearfully ill,--he had been drinking deeply last night, I am sure,--and his manner was agitated and incoherent. He talked of his persecutions and his miseries, as every man who has the best blessings of life at his command and throws them away does talk; and his lamentations about this cursed infatuation of his were mixed up with self-reproaches on your account, and imprecations on the men who have tabooed him, and especially because he was rejected at the Maecenas." "Poor Charles!" said Lady Mitford musingly; "all the enemies he has ever had could have done him little harm, had he not doubled in his own person the strength of his enemies to injure him. He began ill; and when he made an effort to do well, some gloomy recollection, some haunting fear, always seemed to keep him back. There was some evil power over him, Captain Bligh, before this woman laid her spells upon him--a power which made him moody and wretched and reckless. This was a subject upon which it was impossible for me to speak to him; and I accounted for it easily enough, and I have no doubt with tolerable correctness. You know, and I know, that the early years of Sir Charles's life were full of dark days and questionable associations. He was unfortunate at least as much as guilty; and not the smallest of the misfortunes of such a career is the power it gives to miscreants of every kind to embitter one's future and tarnish one's fame, to blight the hopes and the efforts with which one endeavours to rise above the mud-deposit of follies and sins repented and abandoned. There has never been a case, I am sure, in which a man who had gone extensively wrong, and who then tried to go right, and got a good chance of doing it, was not pursued and persecuted by harpies of the old brood, whose talons perpetually branded him, and whose inexorable pursuit kept him constantly depressed and miserable. Then he will be driven to excitement, to dissipation, to anything--which will enable him to forget the torture; but this very necessity deprives all his efforts of vigour, and renders him hopeless of success. I am confident that some such merciless grinding misery lay hidden in Sir Charles's life. I saw it very shortly after we came to town; and I had reason to