oom and on his face. And by that light the face was changed; young
emotions had brought back youth,--my father looked a young man. But what
pain was there! If the memory alone could raise what, after all, was but
the ghost of suffering, what had been its living reality! Involuntarily
I seized his hand; my father pressed it convulsively, and said with a
deep breath: "It was too late; Trevanion was Lady Ellinor's accepted,
plighted, happy lover. My dear Katherine, I do not envy him now; look
up, sweet wife, look up!"

(1). The anaglyph was peculiar to the Egyptian priests; the hieroglyph
generally known to the well educated.

(2). Lucian, The Dream of Micyllus.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Ellinor (let me do her justice) was shocked at my silent emotion. No
human lip could utter more tender sympathy, more noble self-reproach;
but that was no balm to my wound. So I left the house; so I never
returned to the law; so all impetus, all motive for exertion, seemed
taken from my being; so I went back into books. And so a moping,
despondent, worthless mourner might I have been to the end of my days,
but that Heaven, in its mercy, sent thy mother, Pisistratus, across
my path; and day and night I bless God and her, for I have been, and
am--oh, indeed, I am a happy man!"

My mother threw herself on my father's breast, sobbing violently, and
then turned from the room without a word; my father's eye, swimming in
tears, followed her; and then, after pacing the room for some moments
in silence, he came up to me, and leaning his arm on my shoulder,
whispered, "Can you guess why I have now told you all this, my son?"

"Yes, partly: thank you, father," I faltered, and sat down, for I felt
faint.

"Some sons," said my father, seating himself beside me, "would find in
their father's follies and errors an excuse for their own; not so will
you, Pisistratus."

"I see no folly, no error, sir; only nature and sorrow."

"Pause ere you thus think," said my father. "Great was the folly and
great the error of indulging imagination that has no basis, of linking
the whole usefulness of my life to the will of a human creature like
myself. Heaven did not design the passion of love to be this tyrant;
nor is it so with the mass and multitude of human life. We dreamers,
solitary students like me, or half-poets like poor Roland, make our own
disease. How many years, even after I had regained serenity, as
your mother gave me a home long not appreciated,