“I will not try to press into your confidence, Sherbrooke,” replied Wilton, “though I think in some things I have shown myself deserving of it.  But I need hardly tell you, that if I can serve you, I am always most willing to do so, and you need but command me.”

“Alas! my dear Wilton,” replied Lord Sherbrooke—­“this is a matter in which you can do nothing.  It is like one man trying to lift Paul’s church upon his back, and another coming tip and offering to help him.  If I did what was right, and according to the best prescribed practice, I should repay your kind wishes and offers by turning round and cutting your throat.”

“Nay, nay, my dear Sherbrooke,” replied Wilton, “you are in one of your misanthropical fits, and carry it even further than ordinary.  The world is bad enough, but not so bad as to present us with many instances of people cutting each other’s throats as a reward for offers of service.”

“You are very wise, Wilton,” replied Lord Sherbrooke, “but nevertheless you will find out that at present I am right and you are wrong.  However, let us talk of something else;” and he dashed off at once into a wild gay strain of merriment, as unaccountable as the grave and gloomy tone with which he had entered into the conversation.

This morning’s interview formed the type of Lord Sherbrooke’s conduct during the whole time of his stay in town.  Continual fluctuations, not only in his own spirits, but in his demeanour towards Wilton himself; evidently showed his friend that he was agitated internally by some great grief or terrible anxiety.  Indeed, from time to time, his words suffered it to appear, though not, perhaps, in the same manner that the words of other men would have done in similar circumstances.  The only thing in which he seemed to take pleasure was in attending the trials of the various conspirators; and when any of them displayed any fear or want of firmness, he found therein a vast source of merriment, and would come home laughing to Wilton, and telling him how the beggarly wretch had showed his pale fright at the block and axe.

“That villain Knightly,” he said, one day, “who was as deep or deeper in the plot than any of the others, and surveyed the ground for the King’s assassination, came into court the colour of an old woman’s green calamanco petticoat, gaping and trembling in every limb like a boar’s head in aspic jelly; and Heaven knows that I, who stood looking and laughing at him, would have taken his place for a dollar.”

The perfect conviction that some very serious cause existed for this despondency induced Wilton to deviate from the line of conduct he had laid down for himself, and to urge Lord Sherbrooke at various times to make him acquainted with the particulars of his situation, and to give him the opportunity of assisting him if possible.  Lord Sherbrooke resisted pertinaciously.  He sometimes answered his friend kindly and feelingly, sometimes sullenly, sometimes angrily.  But he