This year knows nothing of last year To-morrow has no more to say
To yesterday.
—Swinburne.
That same afternoon, and at about the same time as Rupert Kestyon's coach swung out of the gates of the Bell yard, Sir John Ayloffe presented himself at his kinswoman's house in Holborn Row.
 
He had come in answer to an urgent and peremptory summons, and had made all haste, seeing that he had just heard the news that it was Michael Kestyon who had been arrested for treason, and not the fair Julia's erstwhile faithful adorer, Rupert. Visions of that exceedingly pleasant ￡12,000 which he had thought were lost to him for ever when Michael obtained the peerage of Stowmaries, once more rose before his mind's eye, surrounded with the golden halo of anticipatory hope.
 
Of a truth, if Michael was condemned and executed for treason—and there was but little doubt of that, taking the temper of Parliament and people on the subject of the hellish Popish plots—then young Rupert would come into his own again very quickly and there was no reason why the pleasing scheme of the fair Julia's marriage with her faithful admirer should not reach success after all.
 
To Cousin John's supreme astonishment, however, instead of finding his beautiful cousin in gleeful excitement at the good news, he saw her lying on a sofa in her tiny[384] boudoir with her fair head buried in billows of lace cushions, and on the verge of hysterics.
 
She was clutching a letter in her hand, and when Cousin John approached her, with that diffidence peculiar to the male creature in face of feminine tears, she held out the paper mutely towards him.
 
It was a letter signed Rupert Kestyon. Cousin John quickly ran his eye over its contents. In flowery and elegant language and with many reproaches directed at the cruel beauty who that very morning had struck him to the heart at a moment when she believed him to be in the most dire distress, the writer explained that Fate would now part him fro............