moody brow like Fairthorn's flute or Fairthorn's familiar converse.

It has been said before that Fairthorn knew his secrets. Fairthorn had
idolised Caroline Lyndsay. Fairthorn was the only being in the world to
when Guy Darrell could speak of Caroline Lyndsay--to whom he could own
the unconquerable but unforgiving love which had twice driven him from
the social world. Even to Fairthorn, of course, all could not be told.
Darrell could not speak of the letter he had received at Malta, nor of
Caroline's visit to him at Fawley; for to do so, even to Fairthorn, was
like a treason to the dignity of the Beloved. And Guy Darrell might rail
at her inconstancy--her heartlessness; but to boast that she had lowered
herself by the proffers that were dictated by repentance, Guy Darrell
could not do that;--he was a gentleman. Still there was much left to
say. He could own that he thought she would now accept his hand; and
when Fairthorn looked happy at that thought, and hinted at excuses for
her former fickleness, it was a great relief to Darrell to fly into a
rage; but if the flute-player meanly turned round and became himself
Caroline's accuser, then poor Fairthorn was indeed frightened; for
Darrell's trembling lip or melancholy manner overwhelmed the assailant
with self-reproach, and sent him sidelong into one of his hidden coverts.

But at this moment Fairthorn was a support to him under other trials--
Fairthorn, who respects as he does, as no one else ever can, the sanctity
of the Darrell line--who would shrink like himself from the thought that
the daughter of Jasper Losely, and in all probability not a daughter of
Matilda Darrell, should ever be mistress of that ancestral hall, lowly
and obscure and mouldering though it be--and that the child of a sharper,
a thief, a midnight assassin, should carry on the lineage of knights and
warriors in whose stainless scutcheons, on many a Gothic tomb or over the
portals of ruined castles, was impaled the heraldry of Brides sprung from