“Your faithful servant,
“Gabriel Harford.”
Norton’s face, as he read, was a curious study. Anything more unlike his notion of a love-letter it was impossible to conceive. He read it twice, and a new sense of shame began to steal over him. His eyes at length rivetted themselves on the one sentence, “for the sake of old days,” but he was looking, in truth, at some scene long ago in his own life—a scene which softened him strangely, and called out the better side of his nature.
“Curse it!” he cried, at length, beginning to pace the room restlessly. “I wish I had never meddled with that boy’s love-letter. God! if I could undo the past!”
With a hand that shook, he took up a tankard of ale and hastily drained it.
“Humph! that’s better,” he muttered. “A pox on such soft-hearted sentiment! It must be as the proverb hath it, ‘Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.’ I can no more undo my past than I can get this letter back into the messenger’s pocket, and there’s an end on’t.”
With that he tore up the sheet and flung the pieces out of the window, watching the rapid way in which the summer wind whirled them into space. Then, drawing out the Major’s letter, he once more perused it, and very soon was laughing heartily over the father’s matrimonial hopes for his daughter.
“‘Twill be hard if I can’t contrive to put a spoke in his wheel,” he thought. “I’ll be revenged on him before long, and on Mr. Gabriel Harford, too. What does the fellow mean by philandering with little Nell, when he is still courting this Hereford lady? I should have had her t’other night if it had not been for his cursed knight-errantry.”
And then once more that memory which had no connection at all with little Helena Locke came back to torture him.
With an impatient shrug of the shoulders he drew out his pipe and began to fill it, humming to himself meanwhile a song from The Queen of Corinth: