.

"It is the attitude of the injurer, not of the injured!" said Clarence,
firmly.

"Injured! insolent reprobate, is it not I who am injured? Do you not
read it in my brow,--here, here?" and the old man struck his clenched
hand violently against his temples. "Was I not injured?" he continued,
sinking his voice into a key unnaturally low; "did I not trust
implicitly? did I not give up my heart without suspicion? was I not
duped deliciously? was I not kind enough, blind enough, fool enough
and was I not betrayed,--damnably, filthily betrayed? But that was
no injury. Was not my old age turned into a sapless tree, a poisoned
spring? Were not my days made a curse to me, and my nights a torture?
Was I not, am I not, a mock and a by-word, and a miserable, impotent,
unavenged old man? Injured! But this is no injury! Boy, boy, what are
your wrongs to mine?"

"Father!" cried Clarence, deprecatingly, "I am not the cause of your
wrongs: is it just that the innocent should suffer for the guilty?"

"Speak not in that voice!" cried the old man, "that voice!--fie, fie on
it. Hence! away! away, boy! why tarry you? My son! and have that voice?
Pooh, you are not my son. Ha! ha!--my son?"

"What am I, then?" said Clarence, soothingly: for he was shocked and
grieved, rather than irritated by a wrath which partook so strongly of
insanity.

"I will tell you," cried the father, "I will tell you what you are: you
are my curse!"

"Farewell!" said Clarence, much agitated, and retiring to the window by
which he had entered; "may your heart never smite you for your cruelty!
Farewell! may the blessing you have withheld from me be with you!"

"Stop! stay!" cried the father; for his fury was checked for one moment,
and his nature, fierce as it was, relented: but Clarence was already
gone, and the miserable old man was left alone to darkness, and
solitude, and the passions which can make a hell of the human heart!

CHAPTER LIV.

Sed quae praeclara et prospera tanti,
Ut rebus laetis par sit mensura malornm?--JUVENAL.

["But what excellence or prosperity so great that there should be
an equal measure of evils for our joys?"]

We are now transported to a father and a son of a very different stamp.

It was about the hour of one p.m., when the door of Mr. Vavasour
Mordaunt's study was thrown open, and the servant announced Mr. Brown.

"Your servant, sir; your servant, Mr. Henry," said the itinerant,
bowing low to the two gent