the nursery still crept across his pure lips; but now the fair,
chiseled lineaments were blotted by dissipation, and blackened and
distorted by the baleful fires of a fierce, passionate nature, and a
restless, powerful, and unhallowed intellect. Symmetrical and grand
as that temple of Juno, in shrouded Pompeii, whose polished shafts
gleamed centuries ago in the morning sunshine of a day of woe, whose
untimely night has endured for nineteen hundred years, so, in the
glorious flush of his youth, this man had stood facing a noble and
possibly a sanctified future; but the ungovernable flames of sin had
reduced him, like that darkened and desecrated fane, to a melancholy
mass of ashy arches and blackened columns, where ministering
priests, all holy aspirations, slumbered in the dust. His dress was
costly but negligent, and the red stain on his jacket told that his
hunt had not been fruitless. He wore a straw hat, belted with broad
black ribbon, and his spurred boots were damp and muddy.

What was there about this surly son of her hostess which recalled to
Edna's mind her grandfather's words, "He is a rude, wicked,
blasphemous man." She had not distinctly seen the face of the
visitor at the shop; but something in the impatient, querulous tone,
in the hasty, haughty step, and the proud lifting of the regal head,
reminded her painfully of him whose overbearing insolence had so
unwontedly stirred the ire of Aaron Hunt's genial and generally
equable nature. While she pondered this inexplicable coincidence,
voices startled her from the next room, whence the sound floated
through the window.

"If you were not my mother, I should say you were a candidate for a
straight-jacket and a lunatic asylum; but as those amiable
proclivities are considered hereditary, I do not favor that