orn was a support to him under other
trials--Fairthorn, who respects as he does, as no one else ever can,
the sanctity of the Darrell line--who would shrink like himself from the
thought that the daughter of Jasper Losely, and in all probability not
a daughter of Matilda Darrell, should ever be mistress of that ancestral
hall, lowly and obscure and mouldering though it be--and that the child
of a sharper, a thief, a midnight assassin, should carry on the lineage
of knights and warriors in whose stainless scutcheons, on many a Gothic
tomb or over the portals of ruined castles, was impaled the heraldry of
Brides sprung from the loins of Lion Kings! Darrell, then, doing full
justice to all Sophy's beauty and grace, purity and goodness, was more
and more tortured by the conviction that she could never be wife to the
man on whom, for want of all nearer kindred, would devolve the heritage
of the Darrell name.

On the other hand, Sophy's feelings towards her host were almost equally
painful and embittered. The tenderness and reverence that he had showed
to her beloved grandfather, the affecting gratitude with which Waife
spoke of him, necessarily deepened her prepossessions in his favour as
Lionel's kinsman; and though she saw him so sparingly, still, when
they did meet, she had no right to complain of his manner. It might be
distant, taciturn; but it was gentle, courteous--the manner which might
be expected, in a host of secluded habits, to a young guest from
whose sympathies he was removed by years, but to whose comforts he was
unobtrusively considerate--whose wishes were delicately forestalled. Yet
was this all that her imagination had dared to picture on entering those
grey walls? Where was the evidence of the relationship of which she had
dreamed?--where a single sign that she was more in that house than a
mere guest?--where, alas! a token that even Lionel had named her to his
kinsman, and that for Lionel's sake that kinsman bade her welcome?
And Lionel too--gone the very day before she arrived! That she learned
incidentally from the servant who showed her into the room. Gone, and
not addressed a line to herself, though but to condole with her on her
grandfather's illness, or congratulate her that the illness had spared
the life! She felt wounded to the very core. As Waife's progressive
restoration allowed her thoughts more to revert to so many causes for
pain and perplexity, the mystery of all connected with her own and