nct in its unrivalled
melody, all so aided the sense of mere words that it is scarcely
extravagant to say he might have talked an unknown language, and a
listener would have understood. But, understood or not, those sweet
intonations it was such delight to hear that any one with nerves alive
to music would have murmured, "Talk on forever." And in this gift
lay one main secret of the man's strange influence over all who came
familiarly into his intercourse; so that if Darrell had ever bestowed
confidential intimacy on any one not by some antagonistic idiosyncrasy
steeled against its charm, and that intimacy had been withdrawn, a void
never to be refilled must have been left in the life thus robbed.

Stopping at his door, as Lionel, rapt by the music, had forgotten the
pain of the revery so bewitchingly broken, Darrell detained the hand
held out to him, and said, "No, not yet; I have something to say to you:
come in; let me say it now."

Lionel bowed his head, and in surprised conjecture followed his kinsman
up the lofty stairs into the same comfortless stately room that has been
already described. When the servant closed the door, Darrell sank into
a chair. Fixing his eye upon Lionel with almost parental kindness, and
motioning his young cousin to sit by his side, close, he thus began,

"Lionel, before I was your age I was married; I was a father. I
am lonely and childless now. My life has been moulded by a solemn
obligation which so few could comprehend that I scarce know a man living
beside yourself to whom I would frankly confide it. Pride of family is a
common infirmity,--often petulant with the poor, often insolent with the
rich; but rarely, perhaps, out of that pride do men construct a positive
binding duty, which at all self-sacrifice should influence the practical
choice of life. As a child, before my judgment could discern how much of
vain superstition may lurk in our reverence for the dead, my whole heart
was engaged in a passionate dream, which my waking existence became
vowed to realize. My father!--my lip quivers, my eyes moisten as I
recall him, even now,--my father!--I loved him so intensely!--the love
of childhood, how fearfully strong it is! All in him was so gentle,
yet so sensitive,--chivalry without its armour. I was his constant
companion: he spoke to me unreservedly, as a poet to his muse. I wept at
his sorrows; I chafed at his humiliations. He talked of ancestors as he
thought of them; to him the