Guy looked at him carelessly.  “Thank you; I am in no humor to listen to your confessions.  You may be quite easy; I give you credit for all imaginable rascality.  Remember what I said:  if I miss any thing, the police will be after you the same day.  Now, once more, go.  If I see your face about here again, it will be the worse for you.”

There was a good deal of meaning in Willis’s smile, though, his lips were white with fear.  “You will never miss what I was going to tell you about, sir,” he said; and then faded away out of the room with his usual noiseless step, closing the door softly behind him.

If his master could have guessed what was the secret he had refused to hear, haughty as he was, I do believe there is no earthly degradation to which he would not have abased himself to gain its knowledge.

But the hour for the humbling of the strong, self-reliant nature had not come yet, though it was very near.  The wild bull never saw the net till its meshes had trapped him fast.

The same morning Guy, who was lounging an hour away at the Bellasys’, mentioned to them what had occurred.  If he had glanced at Flora’s face just then, he would have been puzzled to guess what there was in the intelligence to turn her so deadly pale.  It was only for an instant that the accomplished actress forgot her part, and when he looked at her next there was not a trace of emotion in her face.

“Have you filled up his place?” she asked, carelessly.

“I have ordered my landlord to provide me,” replied Guy.  “I shall find some well-trained scoundrel on my return, I hope.  I shall never get another like Willis, though.  It’s just my luck.  The great principle of the gazelle runs through life:  When they come to know you well, &c.  What made you ask?  Surely you have no protege to recommend?”

Flora laughed gayly as she answered in the negative, and so the subject dropped; but all the afternoon she was pensive and absent, and flashes of vexation gleamed every now and then fitfully in her stormy eyes.

CHAPTER XXVI.

               “Let none think to fly the danger,
     For, soon or late, Love is his own avenger.”

Christmas-tide had come round again, and hall, manor-house, and castle were filling fast.  But the pheasants had a jubilee at Kerton, to the great discouragement of Mallett, who “could not mind such another breeding season.”  Foxes were strong and plentiful with the Belvoir and the Pytchley; and, during two months of open weather, many a straight-goer had died gallantly in the midst of the wide pasture-grounds, testifying with his last breath to the generalship of Goodall and Payne.  But the best shot and the hardest rider in Northamptonshire lingered on still in Paris, wasting his patrimony in most riotous living, and trying his iron constitution presumptuously.

Lady Catharine sat alone in the gray old house, paler and more care-worn than ever.  I think she would have preferred the noisiest revel that ever broke her slumbers in the old times to the dead silence that brooded like a mist in the deserted rooms.