on.
Again the dark fire, lit so fatally on his marriage-day, and since then
sometimes fiercely raging, sometimes smothered down to a mere spark,
yet never wholly extinguished, rose up in the young man's strong,
self-contained, strangely silent heart. Would his pride never let it
burst forth, that, mingling with the common air, it might burn itself to
nothingness! But how many a whole life has been tortured and consumed
by just such a little flame, a mere spark, let fall by some evil tongue
which is set on fire of hell.

While they paused--the wife waiting, she knew not for what, except that
it seemed so easy to follow and so hard to quit her husband--there was a
cry heard on the staircase at the foot of which they stood. Mrs. Dugdale
came running down in terror.

"Nathanael--Agatha--I have told my father that Fred is here. Oh, come to
him, do come!"

No time for pitiful earthly passions, jealousies, and regrets. Nathanael
ran quick as lightning, his wife following. But at the door of the
sick-room even she recoiled.

The old man sat up in bed, raised on pillows; either the paralysis
had not been so entire as was at first supposed, or he had slightly
recovered from it. His right arm moved feebly; his tongue was loosed,
though only in a half-intelligible jabber. But his countenance showed
that, however lay the miserable body, the poor old man was in his right
mind. Alas! that mind was not at peace, not lighted with the holy glow
cast on the dying by the world to come, It was filled with rage and
torment.

Nathanael ran to him, "Father, father, you will destroy yourself. What
is it you want?"

The answer was unintelligible to his son, but Agatha gathered from it
that the chamber-door was to be shut and bolted. She did so; yet even
then the sick man's fury scarce abated. Broken words--curses that the
helpless lips refused to ratify; terrible outbursts of wrath, mingled
with the piteous moan of senility. Last of all came the name, once given
proudly by the young father to his first-born, and now gasped out with
maledictions from the same father's dying lips--"Frederick."

Nathanael and Agatha looked at one another with horror. They both knew
that the old Squire was bent on driving from his death-bed his own, his
first-born son.

Agatha instinctively held down the palsied hands, which were trying to
lift themselves towards heaven--not in prayers!

"Father, don't say--don't even think such terrible things. Whatever