have been equally disappointed. Sophy had nothing to communicate. Her
ingenuousness utterly baffled the poor flute-player. Out of an innocent,
unconscious kind of spite, on ceasing to pry into Sophy's descent, he
began to enlarge upon the dignity of Darrell's. He inflicted on her the
long-winded genealogical memoir, the recital of which had, on a previous
occasion, so nearly driven Lionel Haughton from Fawley. He took her to
see the antiquary's grave; he spoke to her, as they stood there, of
Darrell's ambitious boyhood--his arid, laborious manhood--his
determination to restore the fallen line--the very vow he had made to
the father he had so pityingly revered. He sought to impress on her the
consciousness that she was the guest of one who belonged to a race with
whom spotless honour was the all in all; and who had gone through life
with bitter sorrows, but reverencing that race, and vindicating that
honour; Fairthorn's eye would tremble--his eyes flash on her while he
talked. She, poor child, could not divine why; but she felt that he was
angry with her--speaking at her. In fact, Fairthorn's prickly tongue was
on the barbed point of exclaiming: "And how dare you foist yourself into
this unsullied lineage--how dare you think that the dead would not turn
in their graves, ere they would make room in the vault of the Darrells
for the daughter of a Jasper Losely!" But though she could not conceive
the musician's covert meaning in these heraldic discourses, Sophy, with a
justness of discrimination that must have been intuitive, separated from
the more fantastic declamations of the grotesque genealogist that which
was genuine and pathetic in the single image of the last descendant in a
long and gradually falling race, lifting it up once more into power and
note on toiling shoulders, and standing on the verge of age, with the
melancholy consciousness that the effort was successful only for his
fleeting life; that, with all his gold, with all his fame, the hope which
had achieved alike the gold and the fame was a lying mockery, and that
name and race would perish with himself, when the earth yawned for him