“My Lord of Sunbury,” he said, “you see this man before me, and you also mark bow terrible to him is this sudden meeting with one whom he has deemed long dead.  When last we met, I left him on the shores of Ireland after the battle of the Boyne, in which I took part and he did not.  The ship in which I was supposed to have sailed was wrecked at sea, and every soul therein perished.  But I had marked this man’s eagerness to make me quit my native land, in which I had great duties to perform, and I never went to the vessel, in which if I had gone, I should have met a watery grave.  During the time that has since passed, he has enjoyed wealth that belonged not to him, a title to which he had no claim.  He has raised himself to power and to station, and he has abused his power and disgraced his station, till his King is weary of him, and his country can endure him no longer.  In the meanwhile, I have waited my time; I have watched all his movements; I have heard of all the inquiries he has set on foot to prove my death, and all the investigations he instituted, when he found that the boy who was with me had been set on shore again.  I have given him full scope and licence to act as he chose; but I have come at length, to wrest from him that which is not his, and to strip him of a rank to which he has no claim.—­Have you anything to say, Harry Sherbrooke?” he continued, fixing his eye upon him.  “Have you anything to say against that which I advance?”

While he had been speaking, the other had evidently been making a struggle to resume his composure and command over himself, and he now gazed upon him with a fierce and vindictive look, but without attempting to rise.

“I will not deny, Lennard Sherbrooke,” he replied, “that I know you; I will not even deny that I know you to be Earl of Byerdale.  But I know you also to be a proclaimed traitor and outlaw, having borne arms against the lawful sovereign of these realms, subjected by just decree to forfeiture and attainder; and I call upon every one here present to aid me in arresting you, and you to surrender yourself, to take your trial according to law!” “Weak man, give over!” replied the Colonel.  “All your schemes are frustrated, all your base designs are vain.  You writhe under my heel, like a crushed adder, but, serpent, I tell you, you bite upon a file.  First, for myself, I am not a proclaimed traitor; but, pleading the King’s full pardon for everything in which I may have offended, I claim all that is mine own, my rights, my privileges, my long forgotten name, even to the small pittance of inheritance, which, in your vast accessions of property, you did not even scruple to grasp at, and which has certainly mightily recovered itself under your careful and parsimonious hand.  But, nevertheless, though I claim all that is my own, I claim neither the title nor the estates of Byerdale.  Wilton, my boy, stand forward, and let any one who ever saw or knew your gallant and noble father, and your mother, who is now a saint in heaven, say if they do not see in you a blended image of the two.”