CHAPTER XIV.
He brings Earl Osmond to receive my vows.
O dreadful change! for Tancred, haughty Osmond.
-- TANCRED AND SIGISMUNDA.
Mr.Vere, whom long practice of dissimulation had enabled to model his very gait and footsteps to aid the purposes of deception, walked along the stone passage, and up the first flight of steps towards Miss Vere's apartment, with the alert, firm, and steady pace of one who is bound, indeed, upon important business, but who entertains no doubt he can terminate his affairs satisfactorily.

But when out of hearing of the gentlemen whom he had left, his step became so slow and irresolute, as to correspond with his doubts and his fears.

At length he paused in an antechamber to collect his ideas, and form his plan of argument, before approaching his daughter.
"In what more hopeless and inextricable dilemma was ever an unfortunate man involved!" Such was the tenor of his reflections.--"If we now fall to pieces by disunion, there can be little doubt that the government will take my life as the prime agitator of the insurrection.

Or, grant I could stoop to save myself by a hasty submission, am I not, even in that case, utterly ruined?
I have broken irreconcilably with Ratcliffe, and can have nothing to expect from that quarter but insult and persecution.
I must wander forth an impoverished and dishonoured man, without even the means of sustaining life, far less wealth sufficient to counterbalance the infamy which my countrymen, both those whom I desert and those whom I join, will attach to the name of the political renegade.

It is not to be thought of.