e with an anxious air, as if he read
incubating treason, and then press him to his bosom with unusual
fervour, as if he would stifle the idea, which alone was madness.

This child was educated in an hereditary hate of the Dacre family. His
uncle was daily painted as a tyrant, whom he classed in his young mind
with Phalaris or Dionysius. There was nothing that he felt keener than
his father's wrongs, and nothing which he believed more certain than his
uncle's wickedness. He arrived at his thirteenth year when his father
died, and he was to be consigned to the care of that uncle.

Arundel Dacre had left his son as a legacy to his friend; but that
friend was a man of the world; and when the elder brother not only
expressed his willingness to maintain the orphan, but even his desire to
educate and adopt him as his son, he cheerfully resigned all his claims
to the forlorn boy, and felt that, by consigning him to his uncle, he
had most religiously discharged the trust of his confiding friend.

The nephew arrived at Castle Dacre with a heart equally divided between
misery and hatred. It seemed to him that a fate more forlorn than
his had seldom been awarded to mortal. Although he found his uncle
diametrically opposite to all that his misled imagination had painted
him, although he was treated with a kindness and indulgence which tried
to compensate for their too long estranged affections, Arundel Dacre
could never conquer the impressions of his boyhood; and had it not been
for his cousin, May, a creature of whom he had not heard, and of whom no
distorted image had therefore haunted his disturbed imagination; had it
not been for this beautiful girl, who greeted him with affection which
warmed and won his heart, so morbid were his feelings, that he would
in all probability have pined away under the roof which he should have
looked upon as his own.

His departure for Eton was a relief. As he grew up, although his
knowledge of life and man had long taught him the fallacy of his early
feelings, and although he now yielded a tear of pity, rather than of
indignation, to the adored manes of his father, his peculiar temper and
his first education never allowed him entirely to emancipate himself
from his hereditary feelings. His character was combined of many and
even of contrary qualities.

His talents were great, but his want of confidence made them more
doubtful to himself than to the world; yet, at times, in his solitary
musing