When Horace returned--and they could hear his summons at the door, and Peggy's tardy opening--he did not come into the dining-room, but went upstairs at once; sending a message to Susan, to her great disappointment, that he was tired with his walk from Tillington, and was going to rest. Mr. Scarsdale did not retire till a much later hour than usual that night; and when he did, made Susan precede him by a few minutes, that he might see her shut up in her own room, and prevent all communication with her brother. He persuaded himself that they were in a conspiracy against him, and roused his temper with the thought; he spoke more harshly to Susan than he had ever done before in her recollection, and sent her to her own room in tears. Tears!--miserable woman's play of pretended suffering!--at least he was beyond the weakness of being deceived by it; and he smiled bitterly to himself, as he went to his own comfortless rest, thinking on the smiles which would greet her uncle. Unjust fate! unnatural nature!--for these smiles were his, and belonged to him--yet he could not prevent the kind looks of a stranger from stealing this property away. And Susan cried herself to sleep, with hopes and happy anticipations taking the bitterness out of the tears; and Horace sat in his room, where he had hastily extinguished his candle on hearing approaching footsteps--as little inclined to see Susan as his father was that he should; pondering his wiles for overcoming his uncle. Only last night the house had been undisturbed in its unchanging life; now everything was commotion, disturbance, new efforts and hopes, a changed aspect of existence: and all from the advent of that guileless old soldier, who, waking in the night with his twinges of rheumatism, his fears that his bed had not been aired, and his deeper perplexity and pain about his sister's children, mixed these different troubles altogether, with a hazy mist of oppression and distress in his mind as he turned his head towards the wall, and sank into a heavy sleep. CHAPTER XI.