“True, lad; and let’s hope Master Burton will be regular with his payments; for if not, there’s Jail and Ruin for him written in capital letters on yon fellow’s cast-iron phiz, I can see.”

The random hits of these Pool gossips, which were here interrupted by the departure of the coach, were not very wide of the mark.  James Hornby, it was quite true, had been publicly horsewhipped twenty-three years before by Henry Burton on the Doncaster race-course, ostensibly on account of the sudden withdrawal of a horse that should have started, a transaction with which young Hornby was in some measure mixed up; but especially and really for having dared, upon the strength of presumptive heirship to his uncle’s wealth, to advance pretensions to the fair hand of Elizabeth Gainsford, the eldest daughter of Mr. Robert Gainsford, surgeon, of Otley—­pretensions indirectly favored, it was said, by the father, but contemptuously repudiated by the lady.  Be this as it may, three weeks after the races, Elizabeth Gainsford became Mrs. Burton, and James Hornby hurried off to London, grudgingly furnished for the journey by his uncle.  He obtained a situation as shopman in one of the large grocer establishments of the metropolis; and twenty-three years afterwards, the attorney’s letter, informing him that he had succeeded to all his deceased uncle’s property, found him in the same place, and in the same capacity.

A perfect yell of delight broke from the lips of the taciturn man as his glance devoured the welcome intelligence.  “At last!” he shouted with maniacal glee; and fiercely crumpling the letter in his hand, as if he held a living foe in his grasp, whilst a flash of fiendish passion broke from the deep caverns of his sunken eyes—­“at last I have thee on the hip!  Ah, mine enemy!—­it is the dead—­the dead alone that never return to hurl back on the head of the wrong-doer the shame, the misery, the ruin he inflicted in his hour of triumph!” The violence of passions suddenly unreined after years of jealous curb and watchfulness for a moment overcame him, and he reeled as if fainting, into a chair.  The fierce, stern nature of the man soon mastered the unwonted excitement, and in a few minutes he was cold, silent, impassable as ever.  The letter which he despatched the same evening gave calm, business orders as to his uncle’s funeral, and other pressing matters upon which the attorney had demanded instructions, and concluded by intimating that he should be in Yorkshire before many days elapsed.  He arrived, as we have seen, and took up his abode at one of the houses bequeathed to him in Pool, which happened to be unlet.