ringlets of a child. He darted forward, he threw himself almost before
the horses. The coachman drew in, and with an angry exclamation, very
much like an oath, whipped his horses aside and went off. But that
momentary pause sufficed.--"It is she--it is! O Heaven, it is Alice!"
murmured Maltravers. The whole place reeled before his eyes, and he
clung, overpowered and unconscious, to a neighbouring lamp-post for
support. But he recovered himself with an agonising effort, as the
thought struck upon this heart that he was about to lose sight of her
again for ever. And he rushed forward, like one frantic, in pursuit of
the carriage. But there was a vast crowd of other carriages, besides
stream upon stream of foot-passengers,--for the great and the gay
resorted to that place of worship, as a fashionable excitement in a dull
day. And after a weary and a dangerous chase, in which he had been
nearly run over three times, Maltravers halted at last, exhausted and in
despair. Every succeeding Sunday, for months, he went to the same
chapel, but in vain; in vain, too, he resorted to every public haunt of
dissipation and amusement. Alice Darvil he beheld no more!



CHAPTER XIII.

"Tell me, sir,
Have you cast up your state, rated your land,
And find it able to endure the charge?"
/The Noble Gentleman/.

By degrees, as Maltravers sobered down from the first shock of that
unexpected meeting, and from the prolonged disappointment that followed
it, he became sensible of a strange kind of happiness or contentment.