CHAPTER I.

THE DEATH-BED OF JOHN VERNON.--HIS DYING WORDS.--DESCRIPTION OF HIS
DAUGHTER, THE HEROINE.--THE OATH.

"Is the night calm, Constance?"

"Beautiful! the moon is up."

"Open the shutters wider, there. It _is_ a beautiful night. How
beautiful! Come hither, my child."

The rich moonlight that now shone through the windows streamed on little
that it could invest with poetical attraction. The room was small, though
not squalid in its character and appliances. The bed-curtains, of a dull
chintz, were drawn back, and showed the form of a man, past middle age,
propped by pillows, and bearing on his countenance the marks of
approaching death. But what a countenance it still was! The broad, pale,
lofty brow; the fine, straight, Grecian nose; the short, curved lip; the
full, dimpled chin; the stamp of genius in every line and
lineament;--these still defied disease, or rather borrowed from its very
ghastliness a more impressive majesty. Beside the bed was a table spread
with books of a motley character. Here an abstruse system of Calculations
on Finance; there a volume of wild Bacchanalian Songs; here the lofty
aspirations of Plato's Phoedon; and there the last speech of some County
Paris on a Malt Tax: old newspapers and dusty pamphlets completed the
intellectual litter; and above them rose, mournfully enough, the tall,