gloomy, brooding man, in whom they who had best known him from his
childhood could scarcely have recognized a trace of the humane,
benignant, trustful, but wayward and varying Harley, Lord L'Estrange.

He had read that fragment of a memoir, in which, out of all the chasms of
his barren and melancholy past, there rose two malignant truths that
seemed literally to glare upon him with mocking and demon eyes. The
woman whose remembrance had darkened all the sunshine of his life had
loved another; the friend in whom he had confided his whole affectionate
loyal soul had been his perfidious rival. He had read from the first
word to the last, as if under a spell that held him breathless; and when
he closed the manuscript, it was without a groan or sigh; but over his
pale lips there passed that withering smile, which is as sure an index of
a heart overcharged with dire and fearful passions, as the arrowy flash
of the lightning is of the tempests that are gathered within the cloud.

He then thrust the papers into his bosom, and, keeping his hand over
them, firmly clenched, he left the room, and walked slowly on towards his
father's house. With every step by the way, his nature, in the war of
its elements, seemed to change and harden into forms of granite. Love,
humanity, trust, vanished away. Hate, revenge, misanthropy, suspicion,
and scorn of all that could wear the eyes of affection, or speak with the
voice of honour, came fast through the gloom of his thoughts, settling
down in the wilderness, grim and menacing as the harpies of ancient
song--

"Uncaeque manus, et pallida semper Ora."

"Hands armed with fangs, and lips forever pale."