These circumstances had occurred about two years before the knight's visit to Lord Dewry; and it would be more painful and disgusting than amusing or instructive to follow him through the shifts and turnings of the succeeding months. At length the happy thought struck him which we have seen him execute; and with a horse, the last of a once splendid stud, a valise containing all that remained of his wardrobe, three guineas, and some silver in his purse, a vast stock of impudence, and a packet of the peer's old letters, he set out to see whether he could wring anything either from the weakness or the kindness of Lord Dewry, from whom he had won, in former days, many a sum which he now sighed to think upon. He came, as we have seen, at the very moment when the assistance of such a person as himself, who was not in the least scrupulous either in regard to oaths or dangers, was likely to prove most serviceable to the peer, provided that any bonds could be invented, so close and clinging as to restrain a man who had never yet been bound by any principles of religion, morality, or honour. On their meeting, the uses to which he might be put had not at first struck Lord Dewry, and he had given way to the irritable impatience natural to his character: but the last words of Sir Roger Millington concerning Sir William Ryder, had struck a chord of association which soon awoke other ideas; and before the peer had reached his own room he had seen and comprehended the variety of services which Sir Roger might render him. Thought, however, was required, both to arrange and give a tangible form to plans which were yet vague and undefined; and to devise means of so guarding against the very agent he was about to employ as not to fall into a new danger in striving to escape an old one. Men who have involved themselves in the dark work of crime, like those employed in forging red-hot iron, are obliged to touch the objects of their labour with tools of steel, lest they should burn themselves with the bolts they forge. After much thought, however, Lord Dewry believed that he saw means of rendering Sir Roger Millington, not only obedient to his every wish, but faithful also; and though the plans in which he was to be employed, of course required long and intense consideration, the new views that opened before the peer gave him so much comfort that he heard the dressing-bell ring, long before he had expected it, without any feelings but those of renewed security and anticipated triumph over those who had before caused him so much doubt and apprehension.