l, emphatically
summing up his eulogies, "he is so thorough a gentleman!"

"A thorough gentleman, as you say,--the soul of honour! But, my dear
father, it is your hour for riding; let me not detain you. It is
settled, then; you do not come yourself to Lansmere. You put the house
at my disposal, and allow me to invite Egerton, of course, and what
other guests I may please; in short, you leave all to me?"

"Certainly; and if you cannot get in your friend, who can? That borough,
it is an awkward, ungrateful place, and has been the plague of my life.
So much as I have spent there, too,--so much as I have done to its
trade!" And the earl, with an indignant sigh, left the room.

Harley seated himself deliberately at his writing-table, leaning his
face on his hand, and looking abstractedly into space from under knit
and lowering brows.

Harley L'Estrange was, as we have seen, a man singularly tenacious
of affections and impressions. He was a man, too, whose nature was
eminently bold, loyal, and candid; even the apparent whim and levity
which misled the world, both as to his dispositions and his powers,
might be half ascribed to that open temper which, in its over-contempt
for all that seemed to savour of hypocrisy, sported with forms and
ceremonials, and extracted humour, sometimes extravagant, sometimes
profound, from "the solemn plausibilities of the world." The shock
he had now received smote the very foundations of his mind, and,
overthrowing all the airier structures which fancy and wit had built
upon its surface, left it clear as a new world for the operations of the
darker and more fearful passions. When a man of a heart so loving and
a nature so irregularly powerful as Harley's suddenly and abruptly
discovers deceit where he had most confided, it is not (as with the
calmer pupils of that harsh teacher, Experience) the mere withdrawal
of esteem and affection from the one offender; it is, that trust in
everything seems gone; it is, that the injured spirit looks back to the
Past, and condemns all its kindlier virtues as follies that conduced
to its own woe; and looks on to the Future as to a journey beset with
smiling traitors, whom it must meet with an equal simulation, or
crush with a superior force. The guilt of treason to men like these
is incalculable,--it robs the world of all the benefits they would
otherwise have lavished as they passed; it is responsible for all the
ill that springs from the corruption of nat