s of the room and there knelt down.
When he rose, he was passive and tractable as a child. He suffered me to
assist him to undress; and when he had lain down on the bed, he turned
his face quietly from the light, and after a few heavy sighs, sleep
seemed mercifully to steal upon him. I listened to his breathing till it
grew low and regular, and then descended to the sitting-room in which
I had left Lord Castleton, for he had asked me in a whisper to seek him
there.

I found the marquis seated by the fire, in a thoughtful and dejected
attitude.

"I am glad you are come," said he, making room for me on the hearth,
"for I assure you I have not felt so mournful for many years; we have
much to explain to each other. Will you begin? They say the sound of the
bell dissipates the thunder-cloud; and there is nothing like the voice
of a frank, honest nature to dispel all the clouds that come upon us
when we think of our own faults and the villany of others. But I beg you
a thousand pardons: that young man your relation,--your brave uncle's
son? Is it possible?"

My explanations to Lord Castleton were necessarily brief and imperfect.
The separation between Roland and his son; my ignorance of its cause;
my belief in the death of the latter; my chance acquaintance with the
supposed Vivian; the interest I took in him; the relief it was to the
fears for his fate with which he inspired me, to think he had returned
to the home I ascribed to him; and the circumstances which had induced
my suspicions, justified by the result,--all this was soon hurried over.

"But I beg your pardon," said the marquis, interrupting me "did you, in
your friendship for one so unlike you, even by your own partial account,
never suspect that you had stumbled upon your lost cousin?"

"Such an idea never could have crossed me."

And here I must observe that though the reader, at the first
introduction of Vivian, would divine the secret, the penetration of a
reader is wholly different from that of the actor in events. That I had
chanced on one of those curious coincidences in the romance of real
life which a reader looks out for and expects in following the course
of narrative, was a supposition forbidden to me by a variety of causes.
There was not the least family resemblance between Vivian and any of
his relations; and, somehow or other, in Roland's son I had pictured to
myself a form and a character wholly different from Vivian's. To me it
would have se