house by Fairthorn's side, as one who, for the first time in life, feels
on his heart the leaden weight of an hereditary shame.




CHAPTER VI.

Showing how sinful it is in a man who does not care for his honour
to beget children.

When Lionel saw Mr. Fairthorn devoting his intellectual being to the
contents of a cold chicken-pie, he silently stepped out of the room and
slunk away into a thick copse at the farthest end of the paddock. He
longed to be alone. The rain descended, not heavily, but in penetrating
drizzle; he did not feel it, or rather he felt glad that there was no
gaudy mocking sunlight. He sat down forlorn in the hollows of a glen
which the copse covered, and buried his face in his clasped hands.

Lionel Haughton, as the reader may have noticed, was no premature man,--
a manly boy, but still a habitant of the twilight, dreamy, shadow-land of
boyhood. Noble elements were stirring fitfully within him, but their
agencies were crude and undeveloped. Sometimes, through the native
acuteness of his intellect, he apprehended truths quickly and truly as a
man; then, again, through the warm haze of undisciplined tenderness, or
the raw mists of that sensitive pride in which objects, small in
themselves, loom large with undetected outlines, he fell back into the
passionate dimness of a child's reasoning. He was intensely ambitious;
Quixotic in the point of honour; dauntless in peril: but morbidly
trembling at the very shadow of disgrace, as a foal, destined to be the