"Unfortunate indeed," returned the Colonel, "but neither dead nor criminal. I am Allan Neville, a living witness of thy father's crimes, the least of which is usurpation. I accuse him as the foul slanderer of my fame, as the inhuman villain who betrayed my confidence. He knew my woes, my wants, my dependence on his friendship; nay, that I trusted to him only. He smiled, promised, cajoled, and destroyed me. My daughter has told me that thou art warm, ingenuous, sincere, and affectionate. Such, at thy age, was he that now lies before thee, the victim of thy mother's ambition and thy father's hypocrisy." Sedley tried to conceal the burning blushes of shame with his hands, while his recollection of past circumstances confirmed his uncle's accusation. Ambition was the crime of both his parents; hypocrisy the means used by the cautious Lord Bellingham in seeking to compass those ends which his bolder consort pursued with the effrontery of determined versatility. Sedley remembered his mother a court-beauty, the favourite of the Queen, and the glass which reflected the smiles and frowns of royalty. He afterwards saw her the idol of the party which opposed government, sung by Waller, flattered by Holland, presiding with all the frivolity and pride of a pretty trifler at the dark divan, while Pym and St. John disclosed their hopes of extending their aggressions to seizing the remaining prerogatives of the alarmed and conceding King. Weak, vain, passionate, and unprincipled, with no determined object but her own aggrandizement--no claim to attention but an attractive person and soft courtliness of manner (which polished insincerity often assumes to disguise a stubborn, wayward, ungoverned temper),--Lady Bellingham supplied by a shew of benevolence her total want of the reality. He had seen her, without even the affectation of compassion, listen to a detail of the measures which were intended to drag Lord Strafford to the block; and though she boasted of that nobleman as her earliest lover, she made no attempt to procure him the respite for which his afflicted master ineffectually solicited. No storm of public calamity, no sympathizing pity for murdered friends, no sentiment of gratitude for her royal benefactors, ever disturbed the suavity of Lady Bellingham's deportment. Nothing could interrupt the dead calm of her unfeeling heart but opposition to her will, or the apprehension of danger to her effects or person. In the former case the gentle beauty was loud and pertinacious; in the latter, terrified to the extreme, and clamorous in her complaints; in both, perfectly regardless of the means she employed to promote her purposes, or insure her safety.