different nature; in his hand there lay a long lock of fair silken hair,
on which his eyes were fixed sadly and intently. He started at the sound
of his visitor's name, and the tread of the squire's stalwart footstep;
and mechanically thrust into his bosom the relic of younger and warmer
years, keeping his hand to his heart, which beat loud with disease under
the light pressure of that golden hair.

The two brothers stood on the great man's lonely hearth, facing each
other in silence, and noting unconsciously the change made in each during
the long years in which they had never met.

The squire, with his portly size, his hardy sunburned cheeks, the partial
baldness of his unfurrowed open forehead, looked his full age,--deep into
middle life. Unmistakably he seemed the pater familias, the husband and
the father, the man of social domestic ties. But about Audley (really
some few years junior to the squire), despite the lines of care on his
handsome face, there still lingered the grace of youth. Men of cities
retain youth longer than those of the country,--a remark which Buffon has
not failed to make and to account for. Neither did Egerton betray the
air of the married man; for ineffable solitariness seemed stamped upon
one whose private life had long been so stern a solitude. No ray from
the focus of Home played round that reserved, unjoyous, melancholy brow.
In a word, Audley looked still the man for whom some young female heart
might fondly sigh; and not the less because of the cold eye and
compressed lip, which challenged interest even while seeming to repel it.

Audley was the first to speak, and to put forth the right hand, which he
stole slowly from its place at his breast, on which the lock of hair
still stirred to and fro at the heave of the labouring heart. "William,"
said he, with his rich deep voice, "this is kind. You are come to see