"My Lord, you may look at my old weather-beaten features, and wonder any woman would look at me, but I was a well-favoured youngster then. I could put the stone, toss the caber, leap, run, and vault against any young fellow in the county. I was not the sour-faced, hard-featured seaman I am now, and I knew the girl once did love me, and dearly, and I resolved to wait and see what the cause of quarrel really was. But I had to put again to sea. I was away from home nearly a year and a half, but when I came home my ears were assailed right and left with the very thing I had feared--the girl I had promised myself for a wife had been deceived by one in the upper ranks of life; she had fallen, unable to resist the temptation of following one rich, handsome, and with a proud name--he was to be preferred as a lover, before William Hermiston as a husband. He gave her money, handsome dresses, jewels, everything but an honest name and fame, but she could well afford to want them if she had all the conceits a girl's head runs on. In a word she was the dupe of a nobleman. I sought the cottage where I had seen her last: the old woman was there, not the granddaughter; from her I learned who her beguiler had been, and where she then lived. My Lord, it was your father, the young Earl of Wentworth; and he had given her well-furnished apartments near Edinburgh. The Earl had been married more than three years, and he had two children, a little girl and a boy about two years: he visited Agnes on the sly, and only occasionally. "When I learned all this I almost died with passion. I felt a very devil of vengeance enter into my heart. The pride of my soul, the light of my eyes, my love, my destined wife, had been tempted, betrayed, and was now living in guilty splendour. My Lord, see the misery that light loves in high rank bring on the lower class. Your father was rich, powerful, noble by birth and name, possessed of lands, wife, children,--and his evil conduct robbed the poor man of all; surely this was a case of the rich man who took the poor man's lamb--the tale I used to hear of sometimes when I was a boy. And mark the consequences--ah! you great people little think the pretty and innocent girl you pick up, and deck out in finery, is perhaps the only love of some honest, poor man, whose whole life is altered by their crime. Such was the case with me. Owing to your father's choice, I was made a very demon, and the cause of misery untold, not only to the hapless girl herself, but to your own family. Oh! I loved that girl as I once loved heaven. I lost my heaven in her, and lose Heaven by her." The old man here paused to rub away the unbidden tear with his rough sleeve. The Earl, deeply interested, and feeling a home thrust in the narrative of his father's folly, bent forward, but spoke not.