rdinary actions.

But in the letter which lay in Lionel's hand the writer was scarcely
recognisable--the direction blurred, the characters dashed off from a
pen fierce yet tremulous; the seal a great blotch of wax; the device
of the heron, with its soaring motto, indistinct and mangled, as if the
stamping instrument had been plucked wrathfully away before the wax had
cooled. And when Lionel opened the letter, the handwriting within was
yet more indicative of mental disorder. The very ink looked menacing
and angry--blacker as the pen had been forcibly driven into the page.
"Unhappy boy!" began the ominous epistle, "is it through you that the
false and detested woman who has withered up the noon-day of my life
seeks to dishonour its blighted close? Talk not to me of Lady Montfort's
gratitude and reverence! Talk not to me of her amiable, tender,
holy aim, to obtrude upon my childless house the grand-daughter of a
convicted felon! Show her these lines, and ask her by what knowledge of
my nature she can assume that ignominy to my name would be a blessing to
my hearth? Ask her, indeed, how she can dare to force herself still upon
my thoughts--dare to imagine she can lay me under obligations--dare
to think she can be something still in my forlorn existence! Lionel
Haughton, I command you in the name of all the dead whom we can claim
as ancestors in common, to tear from your heart, as you would tear a
thought of disgrace, this image which has bewitched your reason. My
daughter, thank Heaven, left no pledge of an execrable union. But a
girl who has been brought up by a thief--a girl whom a wretch so lost
to honour as Jasper Losely sought to make an instrument of fraud to
my harassment and disgrace, be her virtues and beauty what they may,
I could not, without intolerable anguish, contemplate as the wife of
Lionel Haughton. But receive her as your wife!

"Admit her within these walls! Never, never; I scorn to threaten you
with loss of favour, loss of fortune. Marry her if you will. You shall
have an ample income secure to you. But from that moment our lives are
separated--our relation ceases. You will never again see nor address me.
But oh, Lionel, can you--can you inflict upon me this crowning sorrow?
Can you, for the sake of a girl of whom you have seen but little, or
in the Quixotism of atonement for your father's fault, complete the
ingratitude I have experienced from those who owed me most? I cannot
think it. I rejoice that