Thus saying, he shook the old gentleman's hand, and departed with a heavy heart and anxious mind. During his onward ride, his heart did not become lighter; his mind was only more burdened with cares. As long as he was in Edith's presence, he had borne up and struggled against all that he felt; for he saw that she was already overwhelmed with grief, and he feared to add to it; but now his thoughts were all confusion. With incomplete information--in circumstances the most difficult--anxious to save her he loved, even at any sacrifice on his own part, yet seeing no distinct means of acting in any direction without danger to her--he looked around him in vain for any resource; or, if he formed a plan one moment, he rejected it the next. He knew Edith's perfect truth, he knew the quiet firmness and power of her mind too well to doubt one tittle of that which she had stated; and though at first sight he thought the proofs he possessed of Mr. Radford's participation in the late smuggling transaction were quite sufficient to justify that person's immediate arrest, and proposed that it should take place immediately, yet the next moment he recollected what might be the result to Sir Robert Croyland, and hesitated how to act. Then, again, he turned his eyes to the circumstances in which Edith's father was placed, and asked himself, what could be the mystery which so terribly overshadowed him? Edith had said that his life was at stake; and Leyton tortured his imagination in vain to find some explanation of such a fact. "Can he have been deceiving her?" he asked himself more than once. But then, again, he answered, "No, it must be true! He can have no ordinary motive in urging her to such a step; his whole character, his whole views are against it. Haughty and ostentatious, there must be some overpowering cause to make him seek to wed his daughter to a low ruffian--the son of an upstart, who owed his former wealth to fraud, and who is now, if all tales be true, nearly bankrupt,--to wed Edith, a being of grace, of beauty, and of excellence, to a villain like this--a felon and a fugitive--and to send her forth into the wide world, to share the wanderings of a man she hates! The love of life must be a strange thing in some men. One would have thought that a thousand lives were nothing to such a sacrifice. Yet, the tale must be true; this old man must have Sir Robert's life in his power. But how--how? that is the question. Perhaps Digby can discover something. At all events, I must see him without delay." In such thoughts, Sir Henry Leyton rode on fast to Woodchurch, accomplishing in twenty minutes that which took good Mr. Croyland with his pampered horses, more than an hour to perform; and springing from his charger at the door of the inn, he was preparing to go up and write to Sir Edward Digby, when Captain Irby, on the one hand, and his own servant on the other, applied for attention.