"Do not stay long,
Tony. I feel ill and low spirited. Godfrey surely does not know that I
am in this accursed place. Perhaps he is ashamed to visit me here. Poor
lad, poor lad! I have ruined his prospects in life by my extravagance,
but I never thought that it would come to this. If you see him on your
way, Anthony, tell him (here his voice faltered), tell him, that his
poor old father pines to see him, that his absence is worse than
imprisonment--than death itself. I have many faults, but I love him only
too well."

This was more than Anthony could bear, and he sprang out of the room.

With a heart overflowing with generous emotions, and deeply sympathising
in his uncle's misfortunes, he mounted a horse which he had borrowed of
a friend in the neighborhood, and took the road that led to his father's
mansion; that father who had abandoned him, while yet a tender boy, to
the care of another, and whom he had never met since the memorable hour
in which they parted.

Oak Hall was situated about thirty miles from Norgood Park, and it was
near sunset when Anthony caught the first glimpse of the picturesque
church of Ashton among the trees. With mingled feelings of pride, shame,
and bitterness he rode past the venerable mansion of his ancestors, and
alighted at the door of the sordid hovel that its miserable possessor
had chosen for a home.

The cottage in many places had fallen into decay, and admitted through
countless crevices the wind and rain. A broken chair, a three-legged
stool, and the shattered remains of an oak table, deficient of one of
its supporters, but propped up with bricks, comprised the whole
furniture of the wretched apartment.

The door was a-jar that led into an interior room that served for a
dormitory. Two old soiled mattresses, in which the straw had not been
changed for years, thrown carelessly upon the floor, were the sole
garniture of this execrable chamber. Anthony glanced around with
feelings of an uncontrollable disgust, and all his boyish antipathy to
the place returned. The lapse of nearly twenty years had not improved
the aspect of his old prison-house, and he was now more capable of
appreciating its revolting features. The harsh words, and still harsher
blows and curses, which he had been wont to receive from the miser and
his sordid associate, Grenard Pike, came up in his heart, and, in spite
of his better nature, steeled that heart against his ungracious parent.

The entrance of Mark