Sometimes again he gazed listlessly upon the marks of
devastation, where the carved armorial bearings of the family to whom the
mansion had belonged, had been hacked away from the walls of the building,
and other symbols of nobility or religion had been wantonly mutilated or
destroyed; and at such moments, an almost unconscious sigh would escape
him, ill according with the tenets of the party which he evidently served.
But most generally his attention was directed towards a low window in the
first floor of the projecting wing, not very many feet above the level of
the ground, in front of which a small wooden balcony, filled with flowers,
showed that the occupant of the chamber to which it belonged was probably
of the gentler sex, and of an age when such matters are still objects of
tender and careful solicitude. At these times, evidences of impatience,
almost amounting to pettishness, would appear in his uneasy gestures; and
after a scrutiny of some duration, he would again turn away to resume his
pacing, with a look of trouble and annoyance upon his brow. The handsome
features of that fine face, however, were not formed to express grief, nor
that clear bright eye sorrowful thought; yet, such were the circumstances
of the times, that whenever disengaging them from associations connected
with the balconied window, as his reflections reverted to himself and his
own position, his countenance would fall, and his eye cloud over with an
expression of sadness.

Gerald Clynton was of old family and noble birth. His father, Lord
Clynton, had doated upon his wife with the fondest and most exclusive
affection; and the birth of Gerald, his second son, having been the
occasion of her death in childbed, the agonized husband, who was
inconsolable for her loss, had never been able to look upon the child,
and, in its infant years, had banished it altogether from his sight. The
time arrived, however, when it became necessary to remove the little boy
from the sole care of menials, and to commence the rudiments of his
education; and at that period Mr Lyle, the brother of the deceased Lady
Clynton, finding the aversion of the father towards the poor innocent
cause of the mother's death still more strongly rooted by time, and his
whole paternal affections centred and lavished upon his eldest born, had
taken the child to his home, and, being himself childless, had treated,
and as it were adopted, the boy as his own son.

Time crept on. The bo