he had suffered at his hands as by the contempt which he (Richard) had entertained for him.  Without materials such as his father had possessed to back his pretensions he had imagined himself a sort of irresponsible and sovereign being. (Such infatuation is by no means rare, nor confined to despots and brigands, and when it exists in a poor man it is always fatal to himself.) His education, if it could be called such, had doubtless fostered this delusion; but Mr. Dodge was right; the Carew blood had been as poison in his veins, and had destroyed him.

All this might be true; but such philosophy could scarcely now obtain a hearing, while his enemy was dying of starvation in his living tomb.  It was in vain for him to repeat mechanically that he had also suffered a sort of lingering death for twenty years.  The present picture of his rival’s torments presented itself in colors so lively and terrible that it blotted out the reminiscence of his own.  The recollection of his wrongs was no longer sufficient for his vindication.  He therefore strove to behold his victim in another light than as his private foe—­as the murderer of his friend Balfour, the history of whose end may here be told.

On the night that Richard escaped from Lingmoor, it was Balfour, of course, who assisted him, and who was awaiting him in person at the foot of the prison wall.  The old man’s arms had received him as he slipped down the rope; and the object at which the sentry had fired had been two men, though in the misty night they had seemed but one.  Balfour had been mortally wounded, and it was with the utmost difficulty that, laden with the burden of his dying friend, Richard had contrived to reach Bergen Wood.  As his own footsteps were alone to be traced along the moor, the idea of another having accompanied his flight—­though they knew there was complicity—­had not occurred to the authorities.  Balfour had hardly reached that wretched asylum when he expired, pressing Richard’s hand, and bidding him remember Earl Street, Spitalfields.  “What you find there is all yours, lad,” was his dying testament and last words of farewell.  And over his dead body Richard swore anew his vow of vengeance against the man that had thus, though indirectly, deprived him of his only friend.  He had watched by the dead body, on its bed of rotten leaves, through that night and the whole of the next day; then, changing clothes with it, he had fled under cover of the ensuing darkness, and got away eventually to town.

He had found the house in Earl Street a wretched hovel, tenanted by a few abjects, whom the money found on Balfour—­which he had received on leaving prison—­was amply sufficient to buy out.  Once alone in this tenement, he had easily possessed himself of the spoil so long secreted, and, furnished with it, he had hastened down to Crompton—­the news of Carew’s death having reached London on the very day that he found himself in a position to profit by it.  The very plan which he had suggested