“Never fear, your honor,” replied Gillespie; “I am not the man to betray trust; and indeed, few gentlemen of your rank, as I said, would go so far for the son of an auld friend.  I’ll lose no time, Sir Thomas.”  Sir Thomas, we have had occasion to say more than once, was quick and energetic in all his resolutions, and beyond doubt, the fact that Gillespie found Corbet ready and expecting him on this occasion, fully corroborates our opinion.

Indeed, it was his invariable habit, whenever he found that more than one agent or instrument was necessary, to employ them, as far as was possible, independently of each other.  For instance, he had not at all communicated to Gillespie the fact of his having engaged Corbet in the matter, nor had the former any suspicion of it until he now received the first hint from Sir Thomas himself.  A chaise and pair in less than five minutes drove gently, but with steady pace, back to the spot where the baronet stood at the head of his horses, watching the doors of the carriage on each side every quarter of a minute, lest by any possible chance his victim might escape him.  Of this, however, there was not the slightest danger; poor Fenton’s sleep, like that of almost all drunken men, having had in it more of stupor than of ordinary and healthful repose.

We have informed our readers that the baronet was not without a strong tinge of superstition, notwithstanding his religious infidelity, and his belief in the doctrine of fate and necessity.  On finding himself alone at that dead and dreary hour of the night—­half-past two—­standing under a shady range of tall trees that met across the road, and gave a character of extraordinary gloom and solitude to the place, he began to experience that vague and undefined terror which steals over the mind from an involuntary apprehension of the supernatural.  A singular degree of uneasiness came over him:  he coughed, he hemmed, in order to break the death-like stillness in which he stood.  He patted the horses, he rubbed his hand down their backs, but felt considerable surprise and terror on finding that they both trembled, and seemed by their snorting and tremors to partake of his own sensations.  Under such terrors there is nothing that extinguishes a man’s courage so much as the review of an ill-spent life, or the reproaches of an evil conscience.  Sir Thomas Gourlay could not see and feel, for the moment, the criminal iniquity of his black and ungodly ambition, and the crimes into which it involved him.  Still, the consciousness of the flagitious project in which he was engaged against the unoffending son of his brother, the influence of the hour, and the solitude in which he stood, together with the operation upon his mind of some unaccountable fear apart from that of personal violence—­all, when united, threw him into a commotion that resulted from such a dread as intimated that something supernatural must be near him.  He was seized by a violent shaking