It  needed  all  her  persuasions  to  oppose  this  course  ;  and  indeed,  if
she  had  not  made  use  of  one  unanswerable  argument,  could  she  have,
succeeded.     This  was  the   inevitable  injury  Linton  could  inflict  upon


296  EOLAND    CASHEL.
her^  by  ascribing  the  breach  to  her  influence.  It  would,  be  easy
enough  from  such  materials  as  late  events  suggested,  to  compose  a  history
that  would  ruin  her.  Lord  Kilgoff's  lamentable  imbecility,  the  result  of
that  fatal  night  of  danger — Cashel's  assiduous  care  of  her — her  own
most  natural  dependence  upon  him — all  these,  touched  on  with  a
woman's  tact  and  delicacy,  she  urged,  and  at  last  obtained  his  pledge
that  he  would  leave  to  time  and  opportunity  the  mode  of  terminating  an
intimacy  he  had  begun  to  think  of  with  abhorrence.
If  there  be  certain  minds  to  whom  the  very  air  they  breathe  is  doubt,
there  are  others  to  whom  distrust  is  absolute  misery.  Of  these  latter
Cashel  was  one.  Nature  had  made  him  frank  and  free-spoken,  and  the
circumstances  of  his  early  life  had  encouraged  the  habit.  To  nourish  a
grudge  would  have  been  as  repulsive  to  his  sense  of  honour,  as  it  would
be  opposed  to  all  the  habits  of  his  buccaneering  life.  To  settle  a  dis-
pute with  the  sword  was  invariably  the  appeal  among  his  old  comrades,
and,  such  arbitraments  are  those,  which  certainly  leave  the  fewest  traces
of  lingering  malice  behind  them.  To  cherish  and  store  up  a  secret
wrong  and  wait  in  patience  for  the  day  of  reckoning,  had  something  of
the  Indian  about  it,  that  in  Roland's  eyes  augmented  its  atrocity.
