The paper, which perhaps brought him news of his _success_, and that the vast unsunned hoards of his old progenitor were already his; the paper which he dared not read, for fear of attracting notice, in the dim cowardice of guilt, till he had shut himself up in his own room. But there was nothing in it; not a syllable in it about Marchmain or any sudden death. Had they both perished--both master and servant, in that lonely house on the moor? Or did the recluse of Marchmain live a charmed life? CHAPTER XIX. Two days after, the same party met again in Mrs. Stenhouse's drawing-room. Horace had eluded all attempts on the part of Roger and Sir John to see or have any conversation with him; but he could not keep away from that only place where he had a chance of forgetting himself, or, at least, of counterbalancing one passion with another. He could not explain to himself why he stayed in Harliflax. It was against all his interests; it was trifling with Mr. Pouncet; it was exposing himself to a hundred risks, and leaving the citadel of the business to which he had bound himself undefended. But Horace cared no longer for Mr. Pouncet's credit, or for his own income. The young man was desperate: he was ready at any moment, in pure recklessness, to have flung that secret at anybody's head whom it had a chance of harming, or rendering unhappy, though, with a characteristic sullen obstinacy, he kept it out of reach of those whom it might have served. Nor could he any longer discern, out of the fiery mists which blurred his future, any prospects of his own; he could not make any definite stand upon that visionary thousand pounds a-year which he had extorted from Mr. Pouncet; he could not think, in that lurid haze out of which everything around him rose indistinct, like a phantom, of such a certain and settled act as marriage, with a household and steady beginning of life in its train. No such thing was practicable to the unhappy young man. He might have found some wild solace in breaking through the bounds of decorous life, and persuading Amelia Stenhouse to elope with him; but, except that, nothing tempted his fascinated mind. He could only sit and wait for the explosion--the terrible intelligence which, sooner or later, must come to him from Marchmain.