the knowledge you pretend of my concernments?—How know you now there is such a person in rerum natura, and that I have not been putting a jape upon you all this time?”
“Thou put a jape on me, thou sodden-brained gull?” answered Lambourne, nothing daunted; “why, dark and muddy as thou think’st thyself, I would engage in a day’s space to see as clear through thee and thy concernments, as thou call’st them, as through the filthy horn of an old stable lantern.”
At this moment their conversation was interrupted by a scream from the next apartment.
“By the holy Cross of Abingdon,” exclaimed Anthony Foster, forgetting his Protestantism in his alarm, “I am a ruined man!”
So saying, he rushed into the apartment whence the scream issued, followed by Michael Lambourne. But to account for the sounds which interrupted their conversation, it is necessary to recede a little way in our narrative.
It has been already observed, that when Lambourne accompanied Foster into the library, they left Tressilian alone in the ancient parlour. His dark eye followed them forth of the apartment with a glance of contempt, a part of which his mind instantly transferred to himself, for having stooped to be even for a moment their familiar companion. “These are the associates, Amy,”—it was thus he communed with himself,—“to which thy cruel levity—thine unthinking and most unmerited falsehood has condemned him, of whom his friends once hoped far other things, and who now scorns himself
