unintelligible."

"Your sneer, sir, is no answer; I will not part with you until I have
full satisfaction concerning the fraud you meditate--you shall go with me
before a magistrate."

"Be it so," said Rashleigh, and made a step or two as if to accompany me;
then pausing, proceeded--"Were I inclined to do so as you would have me,
you should soon feel which of us had most reason to dread the presence of
a magistrate. But I have no wish to accelerate your fate. Go, young man!
amuse yourself in your world of poetical imaginations, and leave the
business of life to those who understand and can conduct it."

His intention, I believe, was to provoke me, and he succeeded. "Mr.
Osbaldistone," I said, "this tone of calm insolence shall not avail you.
You ought to be aware that the name we both bear never submitted to
insult, and shall not in my person be exposed to it."

"You remind me," said Rashleigh, with one of his blackest looks, "that it
was dishonoured in my person!--and you remind me also by whom! Do you
think I have forgotten the evening at Osbaldistone Hall when you cheaply
and with impunity played the bully at my expense? For that insult--never
to be washed out but by blood!--for the various times you have crossed my
path, and always to my prejudice--for the persevering folly with which
you seek to traverse schemes, the importance of which you neither know
nor are capable of estimating,--for all these, sir, you owe me a long
account, for which there shall come an early day of reckoning."

"Let it come when it will," I replied, "I shall be willing and ready to
meet it. Yet you seem to have forgotten the heaviest article--that I had