The smell of that dark
crime--that brotherly hatred and attempted murder--seemed to breathe out
of the ground as he dug it up. Was it not better that it should remain
forever buried, for what to him was this old English title--what this
estate, so far from his own native land, located amidst feelings and
manners which would never be his own? It was late, to be sure--yet not
too late for him to turn back: the vibration, the fear, which his
footsteps had caused, would subside into peace! Meditating in this way,
he took a hasty leave of the kind old Master, promising to see him again
at an early opportunity. By chance, or however it was, his footsteps
turned to the woods of ---- Chace, and there he wandered through its
glades, deep in thought, yet always with a strange sense that he was
treading on the soil where his ancestors had trodden, and where he
himself had best right of all men to be. It was just in this state of
feeling that he found his course arrested by a hand upon his shoulder.
"What business have you here?" was the question sounded in his ear; and,
starting, he found himself in the grasp, as his blood tingled to know, of
a gentleman in a shooting-dress, who looked at him with a wrathful brow.
"Are you a poacher, or what?"
Be the case what it might, Middleton's blood boiled at the grasp of that
hand, as it never before had done in the course of his impulsive life.
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