been different: but he has no sympathy with them, good,
narrow, pious people, or they with him: he could not be satisfied
in their society--or I either, for I crave after it all as much
as he--wealth, luxury, art, brilliant company, admiration,--oh,
inconsistent wretch, that I am! And that makes me love him all the
more, and yet makes me so harsh to him, wickedly cruel, as I was
to-day; because when I am reproving his weakness, I am reproving
my own, and because I am angry with myself, I grow angry with him
too--envious of him, I do believe at moments, and all his success and
luxury!"

And so poor Marie sobbed out her confused confession of that strange
double nature which so many Quadroons seem to owe to their mixed
blood; a strong side of deep feeling, ambition, energy, an intellect
rather Greek in its rapidity than English in sturdiness; and withal
a weak side, of instability, inconsistency, hasty passion, love of
present enjoyment, sometimes, too, a tendency to untruth, which is
the mark, not perhaps of the African specially, but of every enslaved
race.

Consolation was all that Sabina could give. It was too late to act.
Stangrave was gone, and week after week rolled by without a line from
the wanderer.

CHAPTER X.

THE RECOGNITION.

Elsley Vavasour is sitting one morning in his study, every comfort
of which is of Lucia's arrangement and invention, beating the
home-preserve of his brains for pretty thoughts. On he struggles
through that wild, and too luxuriant cover; now brought up by a
"lawyer," now stumbling over a root, now bogged in a green spring, now
flushing a stray covey of birds of Paradise, now a sphinx, chimsera,
strix, lamia, fire-drake, flying-donkey, two-headed eagle (Austrian,
as will appear shortly), or other portent only to be seen now-a-days
in the recesses of that enchanted forest, the convolutions of a poet's
brain. Up they whir and rattle, making, like most game, more noise
than they are worth. Some get back, some dodge among the trees; the
fair shots are few and far between: but Elsley blazes away right and
left with trusty quill; and, to do him justice, seldom misses his aim,
for practice has made him a sure and quick marksman in his own line.
Moreover, all is game which gets up to-day; for he is shooting for the
kitchen, or rather for the London market, as many a noble sportsman
does now-a-days, and thinks no shame. His new volume of poems ("The
Wreck" included) is in the pres