CHAPTER IX.
"Thy due from me Is tears: and heavy sorrows of the blood, Which nature, love, and filial tenderness Shall, O dear father, pay thee plenteously!" _Second Part of Henry IV._, Act iv.Sc.

4.
IT was late at night when the chaise that bore Maltravers stopped at the gates of a park lodge.

It seemed an age before the peasant within was aroused from the deep sleep of labour-loving health.

"My father," he cried, while the gate creaked on its hinges; "my father--is he better?
Is he alive ?" "Oh, bless your heart, Master Ernest, the squire was a little better this evening." "Thank Heaven!--On--on!" The horses smoked and galloped along a road that wound through venerable and ancient groves.

The moonlight slept soft upon the sward, and the cattle, disturbed from their sleep, rose lazily up, and gazed upon the unseasonable intruder.
It is a wild and weird scene, one of those noble English parks at midnight, with its rough forest-ground broken into dell and valley, its never-innovated and mossy grass, overrun with fern, and its immemorial trees, that have looked upon the birth, and look yet upon the graves, of a hundred generations.