handwriting. We can tell black from white, and our sagacity has taught
him a lesson.

Colonel Halkett glanced at the detestable penmanship. Lord Palmet did
the same, and cried, 'Why, it's worse than mine!'

Cecilia had protested against the reading of the letter, and she declined
to look at the writing. She was entreated, adjured to look, in Captain
Baskelett's peculiarly pursuing fashion; a 'nay, but you shall,' that she
had been subjected to previously, and would have consented to run like a
schoolgirl to escape from.

To resume the defence of him: he was a man incapable of forming plots,
because his head would not hold them. He was an impulsive man, who could
impale a character of either sex by narrating fables touching persons of
whom he thought lightly, and that being done he was devoid of malice,
unless by chance his feelings or his interests were so aggrieved that his
original haphazard impulse was bent to embrace new circumstances and be
the parent of a line of successive impulses, in the main resembling an
extremely far-sighted plot, whereat he gazed back with fondness, all the
while protesting sincerely his perfect innocence of anything of the kind.
Circumstances will often interwind with the moods of simply irritated
men. In the present instance he could just perceive what might
immediately come of his reading out of this atrocious epistle wherein
Nevil Beauchamp was displayed the dangling puppet of a mountebank wire-
pulley, infidel, agitator, leveller, and scoundrel. Cognizant of Mr.
Romfrey's overtures to Colonel Halkett, he traced them to that scheming
woman in the house at Steynham, and he was of opinion that it was a
friendly and good thing to do to let the old colonel and Cissy Halkett
know Mr. Nevil through a bit of his correspondence. This, then, was a