“I would he had hanged him, with all my heart!” said Mowbray.
“How!—hang Trimmer?—your favourite Trimmer, that has beat the whole country?—and it was only this morning you were half-crying because he was amissing, and like to murder man and mother's son?”
“The better I like any living thing,” answered Mowbray, “the more reason I have for wishing it dead and at rest; for neither I, nor any thing that I love, will ever be happy more.”
“You cannot frighten me, John, with these flights,” answered Clara, trembling, although she endeavoured to look unconcerned—“You have used me to them too often.”
“It is well for you then; you will be ruined without the shock of surprise.”
“So much the better—We have been,” said Clara,
“‘So constantly in poortith's sight,
The thoughts on't gie us little fright.’
So say I with honest Robert Burns.”
“D—n Barns and his trash!” said Mowbray, with the impatience of a man determined to be angry with every thing but himself, who was the real source of the evil.
“And why damn poor Burns?” said Clara, composedly; “it is not his fault if you have not risen a winner, for that, I suppose, is the cause of all this uproar.”