102681 BY THE AUTHOR OF VALERIUS, AND ADAM BLAIR. M Lockril vinso IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD, EDINBURGH; AND T. CADELL, LONDON. M.DCCC.XXIII. REGINALD DALTON. BOOK VI. CHAP. I. Ar an early hour of the first day that our unfortunate spent in his prison, a portmanteau, containing clothes, and the like, was sent to him from his College, and along with this, a letter addressed to him in the handwriting of his father. Reginald, perhaps the very bitterest portion of whose reflections turned upon the Vicar, could not bring himself to open it. "What right have I," he said to himself, "to receive language which now he could not address to me? It was not to me this letter was written. The touch of this bloody hand shall not pollute it."-He was restrained by some secret feeling from destroying it, but he buried it at the bottom of his portman teau; and if at times, in turning over his linen, his eye chanced to rest upon it, it never did so without shrinking. He little suspected what this letter actually contained; had he done so, his behaviour might perhaps have been different. But, at all events, if there was nothing there that could have tended to administer comfort to his bosom, neither, in the present situation of his thoughts, was there, or perhaps could there have been, anything capable of much aggravating their gloom. In a word, the Vicar's letter contained an account of the death of Miss Dalton of Grypherwast. The lady had been rapidly declining in her health ever since the period of her accession to the estate of her family, and she had at last sunk under an attack of nervous fever. The Vicar mentioned in his letter, that he was just preparing to set off for Lannwell, in order to be present at his relation's funeral. It may be easily believed that this was one of the most cheerless journeys that good man ever had the fortune to undertake. From everything that he had heard of the course of Miss Dalton's |