mate with a daughter of the Darrells."

Sheet upon sheet the young eloquence flowed on--seeking, with an art of
which the writer was unconscious, all the arguments and points of view
which might be the most captivating to the superb pride or to the
exquisite tenderness which seemed to Lionel the ruling elements of
Darrell's character.

He had not to wait long for a reply. At the first glance of the address
on its cover, his mind misgave him; the hopes that bad hitherto elated
his spirit yielded to abrupt forebodings. Darrell's handwriting was
habitually in harmony with the intonations of his voice-singularly clear,
formed with a peculiar and original elegance, yet with the undulating
ease of a natural, candid, impulsive character. And that decorous care
in such mere trifles as the very sealing of a letter, which, neglected by
musing poets and abstracted authors, is observable in men of high public
station, was in Guy Darrell significant of the Patrician dignity that
imparted a certain stateliness to his most ordinary actions.

But in the letter which lay in Lionel's hand the writer was scarcely
recognisable--the direction blurred, the characters dashed off from a pen
fierce yet tremulous; the seal a great blotch of wax; the device of the
heron, with its soaring motto, indistinct and mangled, as if the stamping
instrument had been plucked wrathfully away before the wax had cooled.
And when Lionel opened the letter, the handwriting within was yet more
indicative of mental disorder. The very ink looked menacing and angry-
blacker as the pen had been forcibly driven into the page. "Unhappy
boy!" began the ominous epistle, "is it through you that the false and
detested woman who has withered up the noon-day of my life seeks to
dishonour its blighted close? Talk not to me of Lady Montfort's