the man rose before me, of him who had given me all he owned, and gone
with me so cheerfully to prison, though he knew me not from the veriest
adventurer and impostor. I was undecided no longer.

"I must go, Jack," I said sadly; "as God judges, I must."

He looked at me queerly, as if I were beyond his comprehension, picked up
his hat, called out that he would see me in the morning, and was gone.

I went slowly upstairs, threw off my clothes mechanically, and tumbled
into bed. The captain had long been asleep. By the exertion of all the
will power I could command, I was able gradually to think more and more
soberly, and the more I thought, the more absurd, impossible, it seemed
that I, a rough provincial not yet of age, should possess the heart of a
beauty who had but to choose from the best of all England. An hundred
times I went over the scene of poor Comyn's proposal, nay, saw it
vividly, as though the whole of it had been acted before me: and as I
became calmer, the plainer I perceived that Dorothy, thinking me dead,
was willing to let Comyn believe that she had loved me, and had so eased
the soreness of her refusal. Perhaps, in truth, a sentiment had sprung
up in her breast when she heard of my disappearance, which she mistook
for love. But surely the impulse that sent her to Castle Yard was not
the same as that Comyn had depicted: it was merely the survival of the
fancy of a little girl in a grass-stained frock, who had romped on the
lawn at Carvel Hall. I sighed as I remembered the sun and the flowers
and the blue Chesapeake, and recalled the very toss of her head when she
had said she would marry nothing less than a duke.

Alas, Dolly, perchance it was to be nothing more than a duke! The
bloated face and beady eyes and the broad crooked back I had seen that