"Do you mean Pouncet?--Pouncet has consented to his own ruin?" cried Horace, with a pang of disappointment. He had still been reckoning on this as a moral compensation which it would always be in his power to make, to balance more or less his personal guilt. "Not to his ruin--they have made terms," said the Colonel. "He restores the property, and pays something to Roger besides, and there will be no prosecution or exposure. He loses Armitage's confidence, of course, and is no longer his man of business; but he preserves his character, and eases his conscience. All that is arranged. My dear Horace, you are extremely weak: try to compose yourself, and forget these troublesome affairs. If you can, for your health's sake, endeavour to sleep." Horace turned his face sullenly towards the wall, and said no more. Perhaps this sharp pang of unexpected mortification and disappointment eased him of his heavier load. He set his teeth as he turned away and relieved himself from the sight of Uncle Edward's compassionate and kind face: everything humiliated him in that self-importance which was so strong a power within him. He once had it in his power to be at least Roger Musgrave's magnanimous deliverer, and to expose the fraud which had left the youth penniless; but he had lost his opportunity, and even that moral make-up for his other grievous guilt had slid away from him. He lay here powerless, known to one man, at least, in all the blackness of his evil intention, and to more than one man, stood revealed and visible, a willing accomplice in a fraud, left in the lurch by the principal sinner. His disappointment--his failure--the humiliation of his guilt--sickened him to the heart; he closed his eyes upon the light, disgusted and miserable. He had his reward! CHAPTER XXVI. "And so, hinny, you're to be married, and set up in a house of your own; and, 'stead o' solitude, and a wild moor, and ould Peggy, have all the county wishing ye joy. Eh, weel! I'm an ould fool, and nowght else: I think upon the mistress, and I canna forbear. The bride goes forth with joy and blessing, but the Lord alone He knows what will come to pass thereupon." And Peggy, who was standing in the old dining-room--that room so strangely thrilled through, warmed, and brightened with the new life--examining one after another the pretty things which already began to be prepared for Susan's marriage, suddenly sunk down on a chair by the table, and covered her face, and sobbed aloud. "But, Peggy, you should have a cheerful word for me," said Susan--"we have had so much trouble. Things will never happen with me as they did with mamma. For, Peggy," added the bride, with her honest eyes smiling frank and sure out of the warm blush that rose over her face, "we will trust and help each other through every trouble. Trouble never can be very heavy when there are two of us to bear the load."