In his place, an Audley Egerton would have taken some comfort from the
visit, would have murmured, "Thank Heaven! I have not to present to the
world that terrible man as my brother-in-law." But probably Harley had
escaped, in his revery, from Richard Avenel altogether. Even as the
slightest incident in the daytime causes our dreams at night, but is
itself clean forgotten, so the name, so the look of the visitor, might
have sufficed but to influence a vision, as remote from its casual
suggester as what we call real life is from that life much more real,
that we imagine, or remember, in the haunted chambers of the brain. For
what is real life? How little the things actually doing around us affect
the springs of our sorrow or joy; but the life which our dulness calls
romance,--the sentiment, the remembrance, the hope, or the fear, that are
never seen in the toil of our hands, never heard in the jargon on our
lips,--from that life all spin, as the spider from its entrails, the web
by which we hang in the sunbeam, or glide out of sight into the shelter
of home.

"I must not think," said Harley, rousing himself with a sigh, "either of
past or present. Let me hurry on to some fancied future. 'Happiest are
the marriages,' said the French philosopher, and still says many a sage,
'in which man asks only the mild companion, and woman but the calm
protector.' I will go to Helen."

He rose; and as he was about to lock up his escritoire, he remembered the
papers which Leonard had requested him to read. He took them from their
deposit, with a careless hand, intending to carry them with him to his
father's house. But as his eye fell upon the characters, the hand
suddenly trembled, and he recoiled some paces, as if struck by a violent
blow. Then, gazing more intently on the writing, a low cry broke from