CHAPTER XIII.
NEWS OF CHARLES.
AY--in love with Emily! Fiercely now did Julian pour his thoughts that way; if only hoping to forget murder in another strong excitement.
Julian listened to his mother's counsels; and that silly, cheated woman playfully would lean upon his arm, like a huge, coy confidante, and fill his greedy ears (that heard her gladly for very holiday's sake from fearful apprehensions), with lover's hopes, lover's themes, his Emily's perfection.

Delighted mother--how proud and pleased was she! quite in her own element, fanning dear Julian's most sentimental flame, and scheming for him interviews with Emily.
It required all her skill--for the girl clung closely to her guardian: he, unconscious Argus, never tired of her company; and she, remembering dear Charles's hint, and dreading to be left alone with Julian, would persist to sit day after day at her books, music, or needle-work in the study, charming General Tracy by her pretty Hindoo songs.

With him she walked out, and with him she came in; she would read to him for hours, whether he snored or listened; and, really, both mother and son were several long weeks before their scheming could come to any thing.

A _tete-a-tete_ between Julian and Emily appeared as impossible to manage, as collision between Jupiter and Vesta.
However, after some six weeks of this sort of mining and counter-mining (for Emily divined their wishes), all on a sudden one morning the general received a letter that demanded his immediate presence for a day or two in town; something about prize-money at Puttymuddyfudgepoor.
Emily was too high-spirited, too delicate in mind, to tell her guardian of fears which never might be realized; and so, with some forebodings, but a cheerful trust, too, in a Providence above her, she saw the general off without a word, though not without a tear; he too, that stern, close man, was moved: it was strange to see them love each other so.
The moment he was gone, she discreetly kept her chamber for the day, on plea of sickness; she had cried very heartily to see him leave her--he had never yet left her once since she could recollect--and thus she really had a head-ache, and a bad one.
Julian Tracy gave such a start, that he knocked off a cheffonier of rare china and glass standing at his elbow; and the smash of mandarins and porcelain gods would have been enough, at any other time, to have driven his mother crazy.
"Charles alive ?" shouted he.
"Yes, Julian--why not?
You saw him off, you know: cannot you remember ?" Now to that guilty wretch's mind the fearful notion instantaneously occurred, that Emily Warren was in some strange, wild way bantering him; she knew his dreadful secret--"he _had_ seen him off." He trembled like an aspen as she looked on him.
"Oh yes, he remembered, certainly; but--but where was her letter ?" "Never mind that, Julian; you surely would not read another person's letters, Monsieur le Chevalier Bayard ?" Emily was as gay at heart that morning as a sky-lark, and her innocent pleasantry proved her strongest shield.

Julian dared not ask to see the letter--scarcely dared to hope she had one, and yet did not know what to think.