Fanny, with a countenance radiant with joy, took his hand and led him to
his room. Poor child! with that instinct of woman which never deserted
her, she had busied herself the whole day in striving to deck the
chamber according to her own notions of comfort. She had stolen from
her little hoard wherewithal to make some small purchases, on which the
Dowbiggin of the suburb had been consulted. And what with flowers on the
table, and a fire at the hearth, the room looked cheerful.

She watched him as he glanced around, and felt disappointed that he
did not utter the admiration she expected. Angry at last with the
indifference which, in fact, as to external accommodation, was habitual
to him, she plucked his sleeve, and said,--

"Why don't you speak? Is it not nice?--Fanny did her best."

"And a thousand thanks to Fanny! It is all I could wish."

"There is another room, bigger than this, but the wicked woman who
robbed us slept there; and besides, you said you liked the churchyard.
See!" and she opened the window and pointed to the church-tower rising
dark against the evening sky.

"This is better than all!" said Vaudemont; and he looked out from the
window in a silent reverie, which Fanny did not disturb.

And now he was settled! From a career so wild, agitated, and various,
the adventurer paused in that humble resting-nook. But quiet is not
repose--obscurity is not content. Often as, morn and eve, he looked
forth upon the spot, where his mother's heart, unconscious of love and
woe, mouldered away, the indignant and bitter feelings of the wronged
outcast and the son who could not clear the mother's name swept away the
subdued and gentle melancholy into which time usually softens regret for
the dead, and with which most of us think of the distant past, and the
once joyous childhood!

In this man's breast lay, concealed by his external calm, those memories
and aspirations which are as strong as passions. In his earlier years,
when he had been put to hard shifts for existence, he had found no
leisure for close and brooding reflection upon that spoliation of just
rights--that calumny upon his mother's name, which had first brought
the Night into his Morning. His resentment towards the Beauforts, it is
true, had ever been an intense but a fitful and irregular passion. It
was exactly in proportion as, by those rare and romantic incidents which
Fiction cannot invent, and which Narrative takes with diffidence from
the great