to the terms proposed on the part of the Company; viz. that the action be discontinued forthwith, each party pay their own costs, and the whole amount of the policy, minus the £2,000 which had been advanced to Lady Stratton, be paid to Mr. Aubrey within a month from the day of discontinuing the action. Though Kate very vehemently protested against it, she was at length persuaded to allow her brother to act according to the manifest intentions of the venerable deceased; and he in his turn received a very gratifying assurance that she would have given him, under the special circumstances of the case, no anxiety respecting his bond for £2,000 given to Lady Stratton! Thus was Kate no longer a dowerless maiden; having at her absolute disposal a sum of thirteen thousand pounds, in addition to which, in the event of their being restored to the possession of Yatton, she would be in the receipt of the income left her as a charge upon the estate by her father; viz. five hundred a-year. While the cheering sunshine of returning prosperity was thus beaming with daily increasing warmth and brightness upon the Aubreys, "And all the clouds that lower'd upon their house," were, "In the deep bosom of the ocean buried"-- the sun of that proud and weak old man, the Earl of Dreddlington, was indeed going down in darkness. The proceedings which have been laid at length before the reader, arising out of the extraordinary termination of the inquiry set on foot by the ecclesiastical court, and quickly ending in the adoption of measures for the immediate recovery of Yatton, had attracted far too much of public attention to admit of their being concealed from the earl, comparatively secluded from the world though he was. But the frightful confirmation of his assertion concerning what had occurred between himself and Mr. Gammon, respecting Titmouse, appeared to make no commensurate impression upon a mind no longer capable of appreciating it. He had been seized by a partial paralysis shortly after the last interview between himself, Mr. Gammon, and the Duke of Tantallan; and it was evident that his reason was failing rapidly. And it was perhaps a merciful dispensation, for it appeared that the cup of his misery and mortification was not even yet full. That other monstrous fabric of absurdity and fraud, built upon public credulity--the Gunpowder and Fresh Water Company--suddenly dropped to pieces, principally on account of its chief architect, Mr. Gammon, being unable to continue that attention and skill by which it had been kept so long in existence. It suddenly exploded, involving everybody concerned in it in ruin. The infatuated, and now dismayed, shareholders, and the numerous and designing creditors, came crowding round the more prominent of the parties concerned, clamorous and desperate. Meetings were called from time to time--producing, however, no other results, than fearfully extending the prospect of liability incurred. The shareholders had