God.'

'Palter such trash to coward fools!--I want none of your priestcraft,'
returned the nobleman. 'Do I not know the reason of all this affected
love for justice and mercy. Your grand-daughter was to have married this
midnight robber--they were betrothed, or some such trash. Find
him--doubtless _she_ knows how--let them marry--such a son-in-law will
be an honor to your family, and a comfort to your declining years.'

'Your insinuations and your sneers fall as harmless upon me as your
threats,' said the steward with dignity. 'I am eighty-nine, and shall
soon be beyond them: but when you brand with undeserved infamy one who
never injured you--when you accuse my innocent grandchild of being
privy to the concealment of a midnight robber, as you but now called the
unhappy man whom your ill-usage, whom your misdeeds drove from a happy
home and honorable course of life, you commit an action, only equalled
in its baseness, by its cowardice!'

The Earl started up, purple with rage. For a moment, he seemed about to
strike the aged form before him. He paused, however, and stood regarding
him with clenched hands and furious look, and every evil passion glaring
from his eyes. The steward moved not one inch, but confronted him in the
majesty of venerable age.

The agent paused not for one moment in his task, but quietly labelling
and tying up a pile of documents, placed it in its proper pigeon hole,
and went on with methodical exactness to the next. They were a strange
group. The man of business in his chair, pursuing his work as if no
other were present, but observing all that took place nevertheless; the
nobleman in the prime of glorious manhood, noble, as far as physical