With this last effort, and with an expression upon his aspect which
seemed at once to soften and to hallow the haughty and calm character
which in life it was wont to bear, Algernon Mordaunt fell once more
back into the arms of his companion and immediately expired.




CHAPTER LXXXVIII.

Come, Death, these are thy victims, and the axe
Waits those who claimed the chariot.--Thus we count
Our treasures in the dark, and when the light
Breaks on the cheated eye, we find the coin
Was skulls--
. . . . . .
Yet the while
Fate links strange contrasts, and the scaffold's gloom
Is neighboured by the altar.--ANONYMOUS.

When Crauford's guilt and imprisonment became known; when inquiry
developed, day after day, some new maze in the mighty and intricate
machinery of his sublime dishonesty; when houses of the most reputed
wealth and profuse splendour, whose affairs Crauford had transacted,
were discovered to have been for years utterly undermined and
beggared, and only supported by the extraordinary genius of the
individual by whose extraordinary guilt, now no longer concealed, they
were suddenly and irretrievably destroyed; when it was ascertained
that, for nearly the fifth part of a century, a system of villany had