for their happiness, by the fireside, in the arm-chair and corner
appropriated to each,--how strangely they contrast thine own feverish
excitement! And they make room for thee, and bid thee welcome, and then
resettle to their hushed pursuits as if nothing had happened! Nothing
had happened! while in thy heart, perhaps, the whole world seems to have
shot from its axis, all the elements to be at war! And you sit down,
crushed by that quiet happiness which you can share no more, and smile
mechanically, and look into the fire; and, ten to one, you say nothing
till the time comes for bed, and you take up your candle and creep
miserably to your lonely room.

Now, it in a stage-coach in the depth of winter, when three passengers
are warm and snug, a fourth, all besnowed and frozen, descends from
the outside and takes place amongst them, straightway all the three
passengers shift their places, uneasily pull up their cloak collars,
re-arrange their "comforters," feel indignantly a sensible loss of
caloric: the intruder has at least made a sensation. But if you had all
the snows of the Grampians in your heart, you might enter unnoticed;
take care not to tread on the toes of your opposite neighbor, and not
a soul is disturbed, not a "comforter" stirs an inch. I had not slept a
wink, I had not even lain down all that night,--the night in which I
had said farewell to Fanny Trevanion; and the next morning, when the sun
rose, I wandered out,--where I know not: I have a dim recollection of
long, gray, solitary streets; of the river, that seemed flowing in dull,
sullen silence, away, far away, into some invisible eternity; trees and
turf, and the gay voices of children. I must have gone from one end
of the great Babel to the other; for my memory only became clear and
distinct when I knocked, somewhere before noon, at the door of my
father's house, and, passing heavily up the stairs, came into the
drawing-room, which was the rendezvous of the little family; for since
we had been in London, my father had ceased to have his study apart, and
contented himself with what he called "a corner,"--a corner wide enough
to contain two tables and a dumb-waiter, with chairs a discretion all
littered with books. On the opposite side of this capacious corner
sat my uncle, now nearly convalescent, and he was jotting down, in his
stiff, military hand, certain figures in a little red account-book; for
you know already that my Uncle Roland was, in his expe