“I should have thought so, too,” replied Green, “two days ago.  But times have changed, Wilton, times have changed, and, like the wind of a tropical climate, turned round in a single moment.  On my soul,” he continued, vehemently, “one would think that men were absolutely insane.  Here a set of people, whose lives are all in my own hand, dare to tamper with my friends and comrades, to bribe them, to hire them away from me, ay, and to do it so openly that I cannot fail to see it, and that too, at the very moment when they know that I hate and abhor their proceedings, and when they have just reason to suppose that I will take means to frustrate their base and cowardly designs, and only waver between the propriety of doing so, and the wish not to give them over to the death they well deserve.”

“If they have so acted,” replied Wilton—­“if they have shown such base ingratitude towards you, as well as designs dangerous to the country—­for I will not affect to doubt or misunderstand you—­why not boldly, and at once, give them up to justice?  Understand me, I wish to hear nothing more of these men.  I wish to be perfectly ignorant of their whole proceedings.  I wish to have no information whatsoever, except my own suspicions, for if I had, I should feel myself bound immediately to cause their arrest.  But from what you have said in regard to Sir John Fenwick; from what the Duke has said on various occasions; and from what I myself have remarked, I am strongly inclined to believe that there are matters going on which can but end in ruin to those engaged in them, if not in all the horrors of a civil war.”

“That I should not mind—­that I should not mind!” cried Green—­“let us have a civil war; let every man lay his hand upon his sword and betake him to his standard.  That is the true, the right, the only right way to get rid of an usurper.  It has been with the very view of that civil war you talk of that I have banished myself from the station in which I was born, that I have walked by night instead of by day, and that I have kept in constant preparation, throughout the whole of the south of England, the seeds, as it were, of a future army.  And now what have they done?  Not only trusted the command of all things to others, but given that command to men who would do, by the basest and most dastardly means, that which I would do by open force and bold exertion:  men who have mixed up crimes of the blackest die with the noblest aspirations that ever led on men of honour to the greatest deeds; who have soiled and sullied, disgraced and degraded, the cause for which I have shed my blood, ruined my fortune, and seen all the fair things of life pass away like a dream.  By heavens, I could cry as if I were a girl or a baby,” and he dashed away a tear from his eye which he could not restrain; “and now,” he continued, “and now if I do not prevent them they will put a damning seal to all their follies and crimes, which will render that holy and noble cause horrible in the eyes of all men, which will brand it for ever with infamy and shame, and leave it blighted and loathsome, so that men will shrink from the very thought thereof.”