brains with conjecturing if Cutts had betrayed him, or by what other mode
assistance had been sent in such time of need to Darrell. Nor did he
feel that hunger for vengeance, whether on Darrell or on his accomplice
(should that accomplice have played the traitor), which might have been
expected from his characteristic ferocity. On the contrary, the thought
of violence and its excitements had in it a sickness as of shame.
Darrell at that hour might have ridden by him scathless. Cutts might
have jeered and said, "I blabbed your secret, and sent the aid that
foiled it"; and Losely would have continued to hang his head, nor lifted
the herculean hand that lay nerveless on the horse's mane. Is it not
commonly so in all reaction from excitements in which self-love has been
keenly galled? Does not vanity enter into the lust of crime as into the
desire of fame?

At sunrise Losely found himself on the high-road into which a labyrinth
of lanes had led him, and opposite to a milestone, by which he learned
that he had been long turning his back on the metropolis, and that he was
about ten miles distant from the provincial city of Ouzelford. By this
time his horse was knocked up, and his own chronic pains began to make
themselves acutely felt; so that, when, a little farther on, he came to a
wayside inn, he was glad to halt; and after a strong drain, which had the
effect of an opiate, he betook himself to bed, and slept till the noon
was far advanced.

When Losely came down-stairs, the common room of the inn was occupied by
a meeting of the trustees of the highroads; and, on demanding breakfast,
he was shown into a small sanded parlour adjoining the kitchen. Two
other occupants--a man and a woman--were there already, seated at a table
by the fireside, over a pint of half-and-half. Losely, warming himself
at the hearth, scarcely noticed these humble revellers by a glance. And