that he was
angry with her--speaking at her. In fact, Fairthorn's prickly tongue was
on the barbed point of exclaiming: "And how dare you foist yourself into
this unsullied lineage--how dare you think that the dead would not turn
in their graves, ere they would make room in the vault of the Darrells
for the daughter of a Jasper Losely!" But though she could not conceive
the musician's covert meaning in these heraldic discourses, Sophy, with
a justness of discrimination that must have been intuitive, separated
from the more fantastic declamations of the grotesque genealogist
that which was genuine and pathetic in the single image of the last
descendant in a long and gradually falling race, lifting it up once more
into power and note on toiling shoulders, and standing on the verge of
age, with the melancholy consciousness that the effort was successful
only for his fleeting life; that, with all his gold, with all his fame,
the hope which had achieved alike the gold and the fame was a lying
mockery, and that name and race would perish with himself, when the
earth yawned for him beside the antiquary's grave.

And these recitals made her conceive a more soft and tender interest
in Guy Darrell than she had before admitted; they accounted for the
mournfulness on his brow; they lessened her involuntary awe of that
stateliness of bearing which before had only chilled her as the evidence
of pride.

While Fairthorn and Sophy thus matured acquaintance, Darrell and Waife
were drawing closer and closer to each other. Certainly no one would be
predisposed to suspect any congeniality of taste, intellect, experience,
or emotion, between two men whose lives had been so widely different--in
whose faults or merits the ordinary observer would have seen nothing but
antagonism and contrast. Unquestionably their characters were strikingly
dissimilar, yet there was that in each which the other recognised as
familiar to his own nature. Each had been the victim of his heart; each
had passed over the ploughshare of self-sacrifice. Darrell had offered
up his youth--Waife his age; Darrell to a Father and the unrequiting
Dead--Waife to a Son whose life had become his terror. To one man, NAME
had been an idol; to the other, NAME had been a weed cast away into the
mire. To the one man, unjoyous, evanescent glory--to the other, a shame
that had been borne with a sportive cheerfulness, dashed into sorrow
only when the world's contumely threatened to des