there sits Mr. Verner himself in it, leaning back in his chair and
reading. A large fire burns in the grate, and he is close to it: he is
always chilly.

Ay, always chilly. For Mr. Verner's last illness--at least, what will in
all probability prove his last, his ending--has already laid hold of
him. One generation passes away after another. It seems but the other
day that a last illness seized upon his father, and now it is his turn:
but several years have elapsed since then. Mr. Verner is not sixty, and
he thinks that age is young for the disorder that has fastened on him.
It is no hurried disorder; he may live for years yet; but the end, when
it does come, will be tolerably sudden: and that he knows. It is water
on the chest. He is a little man with light eyes; very much like what
his father was before him: but not in the least like his late brother
Sir Lionel, who was a very fine and handsome man. He has a mild,
pleasing countenance: but there arises a slight scowl to his brow as he
turns hastily round at a noisy interruption.

Some one had burst into the room--forgetting, probably, that it was the
quiet room of an invalid. A tall, dark young man, with broad shoulders
and a somewhat peculiar stoop in them. His hair was black, his
complexion sallow; but his features were good. He might have been called
a handsome man, but for a strange, ugly mark upon his cheek. A very
strange-looking mark indeed, quite as large as a pigeon's egg, with what
looked like radii shooting from it on all sides. Some of the villagers,
talking familiarly among themselves, would call it a hedgehog, some
would call it a "porkypine"; but it resembled a star as much as
anything. That is, if you can imagine a black star. The mark was black
as jet; and his pale cheek, and the fact of his possessing no whiskers,
made it all the more conspicuous. He was born with the mark; and his