fed and encouraged, for he would fling it from him with a quick impatient
gesture of the head, resume the book resolutely, or change it for another
which induced fresh trains of thought, or look over Lionel's shoulder,
and make some subtile comment on his choice, or call on Fairthorn for the
flute; and in a few minutes the face was severely serene again. And be
it here said, that it is only in the poetry of young gentlemen, or the
prose of lady novelists, that a man in good health and of sound intellect
wears the livery of unvarying gloom. However great his causes of sorrow,
he does not forever parade its ostentatious mourning, nor follow the
hearse of his hopes with the long face of an undertaker. He will still
have his gleams of cheerfulness, his moments of good humour. The old
smile will sometimes light the eye, and awake the old playfulness of the
lip. But what a great and critical sorrow does leave behind is often far
worse than the sorrow itself has been. It is a change in the inner man,
which strands him, as Guy Darrell seemed stranded, upon the shoal of the
Present; which the more he strives manfully to bear his burden warns him
the more from dwelling on the Past; and the more impressively it enforces
the lesson of the vanity of human wishes strikes the more from his
reckoning illusive hopes in the Future. Thus out of our threefold
existence two parts are annihilated,--the what has been, the what shall
be. We fold our arms, stand upon the petty and steep cragstone, which
alone looms out of the Measureless Sea, and say to ourselves, looking
neither backward nor beyond, "Let us bear what is;" and so for the moment
the eye can lighten and the lip can smile.

Lionel could no longer glean from Mr. Fairthorn any stray hints upon
the family records. That gentleman had evidently been reprimanded for
indiscretion, or warned against its repetition, and he became as reserved
and mum as if he had just emerged from the cave of Trophonius. Indeed he
shunned trusting himself again alone to Lionel, and affecting a long