watching round the precincts till dusk, the count retreated, with an
indignant conviction that his arts had failed to enlist on his side
either the heart or the imagination of his intended victim. He began
now to revolve and to discuss with Levy the possibilities of one of those
bold and violent measures, which were favoured by his reckless daring and
desperate condition. But Levy treated with such just ridicule any
suggestion to abstract Violante by force from Lord Lansmere's house, so
scouted the notions of nocturnal assault, with the devices of scaling
windows and rope-ladders, that the count reluctantly abandoned that
romance of villany so unsuited to our sober capital, and which would no
doubt have terminated in his capture by the police, with the prospect of
committal to the House of Correction.

Levy himself found his invention at fault, and Randal Leslie was called
into consultation. The usurer had contrived that Randal's schemes of
fortune and advancement were so based upon Levy's aid and connivance,
that the young man, with all his desire rather to make instruments of
other men, than to be himself their instrument, found his superior
intellect as completely a slave to Levy's more experienced craft, as ever
subtle Genius of air was subject to the vulgar Sorcerer of earth.

His acquisition of the ancestral acres, his anticipated seat in
parliament, his chance of ousting Frank from the heritage of Hazeldean,
were all as strings that pulled him to and fro, like a puppet in the
sleek, filbert-nailed fingers of the smiling showman, who could exhibit
him to the admiration of a crowd, or cast him away into dust and lumber.

Randal gnawed his lip in the sullen wrath of a man who bides his hour of
future emancipation, and lent his brain to the hire of the present
servitude, in mechanical acquiescence. The inherent superiority of the