"How dares he now to prowl before my own gates? Gadso! if my Lady Lilian sees him once, there will be a pretty disturbance. A shipload of devils will be nothing to it. The girl will die, and my own house will become too hot to hold me. D----nation! too well have I seen the secret passion that has preyed upon her gentle and affectionate heart--the grief--the deep consuming grief that all my magnificent presents and gentle blandishments have failed to soothe. A thousand curses on this upstart beggar, and a thousand more on the mother of mischief, who has raised him up again to cross my path! By what power hath he escaped war and woe, and storm and every danger again to thwart and come in the way of Clermistonlee, whose purposes were never yet foiled by man, or woman either? 'S death! the time has come when the cord of the doomster, or the axe of the maiden, must rid me for ever of this old source of dark forebodings and secret inquietude. Ho, for a guard and a warrant of Council, and then Sir Walter Fenton, Knight Banneret, the Jacobite spy, Chevalier of St. Louis, ex-private soldier, and soi-disant ensign to the Lord Dunbarton, may look to himself! Ha, ha!" and dashing spurs into his horse he galloped madly into the city. CHAPTER XX. THE BUBBLE BURST. To linger when the sun of life, The beam that gilt its path is gone-- To feel the aching bosom's strife, When _Hope_ is dead, but _Love_ lives on. ANONYMOUS. Meanwhile, without recognising Clermistonlee, and not aware that he had been recognized by him, poor Walter, who was of that temperament which is easily raised and depressed, turned away from the gate, crushed beneath the load of a thousand fears at the sight of so gay a cavalier caracoling down the avenue of Bruntisfield. His heart was overcharged with melancholy reflections. "I have been away for five years--in all that time we have never heard of each other. Oh, what if she should have deemed me dead!" Drawing his last shilling from his pocket, the unfortunate cavalier entered a poor change-house by the wayside, where a great signboard creaking on an iron rod and representing a portrait in a red coat and white wig, and having a tremendously hooked nose, imported that it was the 'King William's head,' kept by Lucky Elshender, who promised good entertainment for "man and beast." The small clay-floored apartment, with its well-scrubbed bunkers, and rack of shining plates and tin trenchers, kirn-babies on the mantelpiece, and blazing ingle, where turf and wood burned cheerfully in a clumsy iron basket, supported by four massive legs, looked very snug and comfortable.