With the most eager desire to accomplish his mission, Paul Dempsey did not succeed in reaching “The Corvy” until late on the day after Miss Daly's visit. He set out originally by paths so secret and circuitous that he lost his way, and was obliged to pass his night among the hills, where, warned by the deep thundering of the sea that the cliffs were near, he was fain to await daybreak ere he ventured farther. The trackless waste over which his way led was no bad emblem of poor Paul's mind, as, cowering beneath a sand-hill, he shivered through the long hours of night. Swayed by various impulses, he could determine on no definite line of action, and wavered and doubted and hesitated, till his very brain was addled by its operations. At one moment he was disposed, like good Launcelot Gobbo, to “run for it,” and, leaving Darcy and all belonging to him to their several fates, to provide for his own safety; when suddenly a dim vision of meeting Maria Daly in this world or the next, and being called to account for his delinquency, routed such determinations. Then he revelled in the glorious opportunity for gossip afforded by the whole adventure. How he should astonish Coleraine and its neighborhood by his revelations of the Knight and his family! Gossip in all its moods and tenses, from the vague indicative of mere innuendo, to the full subjunctive of open defamation! Not indeed that Mr. Dempsey loved slander for itself; on the contrary, his temperament was far more akin to kindliness than its opposite; but the passion for retailing one's neighbor's foibles or misfortunes is an impulse that admits no guidance; and as the gambler would ruin his best friend at play, so would the professed gossip calumniate the very nearest and dearest to him on earth. There are in the social as in the mercantile world characters who never deal in the honest article of commerce, but have a store of damaged, injured, or smuggled goods, to be hawked about surreptitiously, and always to be sold in the “strictest secrecy.” Mr. Dempsey was a pedler in this wise, and, if truth must be told, he did not dislike his trade.