"And this is your decision, is it? Mr. Tyrrel, I am ashamed of you!
Almighty God! to hear you talk gives one a loathing for the institutions
and regulations of society, and would induce one to fly the very face of
man! But, no! society casts you out; man abominates you. No wealth, no
rank, can buy out your stain. You will live deserted in the midst of
your species; you will go into crowded societies, and no one will deign
so much as to salute you. They will fly from your glance as they would
from the gaze of a basilisk. Where do you expect to find the hearts of
flint that shall sympathise with yours? You have the stamp of misery,
incessant, undivided, unpitied misery!"

Thus saying, Mr. Falkland gave spurs to his horse, rudely pushed beside
Mr. Tyrrel, and was presently out of sight. Flaming indignation
annihilated even his favourite sense of honour, and he regarded his
neighbour as a wretch, with whom it was impossible even to enter into
contention. For the latter, he remained for the present motionless and
petrified. The glowing enthusiasm of Mr. Falkland was such as might well
have unnerved the stoutest foe. Mr. Tyrrel, in spite of himself, was
blasted with the compunctions of guilt, and unable to string himself
for the contest. The picture Mr. Falkland had drawn was prophetic. It
described what Mr. Tyrrel chiefly feared; and what in its commencements
he thought he already felt. It was responsive to the whispering of his
own meditations; it simply gave body and voice to the spectre that
haunted him, and to the terrors of which he was an hourly prey.

By and by, however, he recovered. The more he had been temporarily
confounded, the fiercer was his resentment when he came to himself. Such
hatred never existed in a human bosom without marking its progress with
violence and death. Mr. Tyrrel, however, felt no inclination to have
recourse to personal defiance. He was the furthest in the world from a