disappointed. The letter-bag contained three letters for himself,--two
with the foreign postmark, the third in Ardworth's hand. It contained
also a letter for Madame Dalibard, and two for Varney.

Leaving the messenger to take these last to the Hall, Percival, with his
own prizes, plunged into the hollow of the glen before him, and, seating
himself at the foot of Guy's Oak, through the vast branches of which the
rain scarcely came, and only in single, mournful drops, he opened first
the letter in his mother's hand, and read as follows:--

MY DEAR, DEAR SON,--How can I express to you the alarm your letter has
given to me! So these, then, are the new relations you have discovered!
I fondly imagined that you were alluding to some of my own family, and
conjecturing who, amongst my many cousins, could have so captivated your
attention. These the new relations,--Lucretia Dalibard, Helen
Mainwaring! Percival, do you not know ---- No, you cannot know that
Helen Mainwaring is the daughter of a disgraced man, of one who (more
than suspected of fraud in the bank in which he was a partner) left his
country, condemned even by his own father. If you doubt this, you have
but to inquire at ----, not ten miles from Laughton, where the elder
Mainwaring resided. Ask there what became of William Mainwaring. And
Lucretia, you do not know that the dying prayer of her uncle, Sir Miles
St. John, was that she might never enter the house he bequeathed to your
father. Not till after my poor Charles's death did I know the exact
cause for Sir Miles's displeasure, though confident it was just; but then
amongst his papers I found the ungrateful letter which betrayed thoughts
so dark and passions so unwomanly that I blushed for my sex to read it.
Could it be possible that that poor old man's prayers were unheeded, that
that treacherous step could ever cross your threshold, that that cruel
eye, which read with such barbarous joy the ravages of death on a