“Who is this new guest you have got, landlord,” inquired the baronet—­“They tell me he is a very mysterious gentleman, and that no one can discover his name.  Do! you know anything about him?”

“De’il a syllable, Sir Tammas,” replied the landlord, who was a northern—­“How ir you, Counsellor Crackenfudge,” he added, speaking to a person who passed upstairs—­“There he goes,” proceeded Jack the landlord—­“a nice boy.  But do you know, Sir Tammas, why he changed his name to Crackenfudge?”

Sir Thomas’s face at this moment, had grown frightful.  While the landlord was speaking, the baronet, attracted by the noise of a carriage passing, turned to observe it, just at the moment when his daughter was bowing so significantly to the stranger in the window over them, as we have before stated.  Here was a new light thrown upon the mystery or mysteries by which he felt himself surrounded on all hands.  The strange guest in the Mitre inn, was then, beyond question, the very individual alluded to in the anonymous letter.  The baronet’s face had, in the scowl of wrath, got black, as mine host was speaking.  This expression, however, gradually diminished in the darkness of that wrathful shadow which lay over it.  After a severe internal struggle with his tremendous passions, he at length seemed to cool down.  His face became totally changed; and in a few minutes of silence and struggle, it passed from the blackness of almost ungovernable rage to a pallid hue, that might not most aptly be compared to the summit of a volcano covered with snow, when about to project its most awful and formidable eruptions.

The landlord, while putting the question to the baronet, turned his sharp, piercing eyes upon him, and, at a single glance, perceived that something had unusually moved him.

“Sir Tammas,” said he, “there is no use in denyin’ it, now—­the blood’s disturbed in you.”

“Give your guest my compliments—­Sir Thomas Gourlay’s compliments—­and I should feel obliged by a short interview.”

On going up, Jack found the stranger and Fenton as we have already described them—­“Sir,” said he, addressing the former—­“there’s a gentleman below who wishes to know who you ir.”

“Who I am!” returned the other, quite unmoved; “and, pray who may he be?”

“Sir Tammas Gourlay; an’ all tell you what, if you don’t wish to see him, why don’t see him.  A ‘ll take him the message, an’ if there’s anything about you that you don’t wish to be known or heard, make him keep his distance.  He’s this minute in a de’il of a passion about something, an’ was comin’ up as if he’d ait you without salt, but a’ would n’t allow it; so, if you don’t wish to see him, am the boy won’t be afeard to say so.  He’s not coming as a friend, a’ can tell you.”

“Sir Thomas Gourlay’s in the house, then,” said the stranger, with a good deal of surprise.  He then paused for some time, and, during this pause, he very naturally concluded that the baronet had witnessed his daughter’s bow, so cautiously and significantly made to himself as she passed.  Whilst he turned over these matters in his mind, the landlord addressed Fenton as follows: