words.

From the first lines to the last, the letter had produced no distinct
impressions on my mind. So utterly was I worn out by the previous events
of the day, that even those earlier portions of Mannion's confession,
which revealed the connection between my father and his, and the
terrible manner of their separation, hardly roused me to more than a
momentary astonishment. I just called to remembrance that I had never
heard the subject mentioned at home, except once or twice in vague hints
dropped mysteriously by an old servant, and little regarded by me at the
time, as referring to matters which had happened before I was born.
I just reflected thus briefly and languidly on the narrative at the
commencement of the letter; and then mechanically read on. Except the
passages which contained the exposure of Margaret's real character,
and those which described the origin and progress of Mannion's infamous
plot, nothing in the letter impressed me, as I was afterwards destined
to be impressed by it, on a second reading. The lethargy of all feeling
into which I had now sunk, seemed a very lethargy of death.

I tried to clear and concentrate my faculties by thinking of other
subjects; but without success. All that I had heard and seen since the
morning, now recurred to me more and more vaguely and confusedly. I
could form no plan either for the present or the future. I knew
as little how to meet Mr. Sherwin's last threat of forcing me to
acknowledge his guilty daughter, as how to defend myself against the
life-long hostility with which I was menaced by Mannion. A feeling of
awe and apprehension, which I could trace to no distinct cause, stole
irresistibly and mysteriously over me. A horror of the searching
brightness of daylight, a suspicion of the loneliness of the place to
which I had retreated, a yearning to be among my fellow-creatures again,
to live where there was life--the busy life of London--overcame me. I
turned hastily, and walked back from the suburbs to the city.

It was growing towards evening as I gained one of the great
thoroughfares. Seeing some of the inhabitants of the houses, as I walked
along, sitting at their open windows to enjoy the evening air, the
thought came to me for the first time that day:--where shall I lay my
head tonight? Home I had none. Friends who would have gladly received me
were not wanting; but to go to them would oblige me to explain myself;
to disclose something of the secret of my