nearer the latter; he still, however, retained, in an
eminent degree, the traits of manly beauty, not the less remarkable for
its unquestionably haughty and passionate character. He had married a
beautiful girl, of good family, but without much money, somewhere about
eighteen years before; and two children, a son and a daughter, had been
the fruit of this union. The boy, Harry Marston, was at this time at
Cambridge; and his sister, scarcely fifteen, was at home with her
parents, and under the training of an accomplished governess, who had
been recommended to them by a noble relative of Mrs. Marston. She was a
native of France, but thoroughly mistress of the English language, and,
except for a foreign accent, which gave a certain prettiness to all she
said, she spoke it as perfectly as any native Englishwoman. This young
Frenchwoman was eminently handsome and attractive. Expressive, dark eyes,
a clear olive complexion, small even teeth, and a beautifully-dimpling
smile, more perhaps than a strictly classic regularity of features, were
the secrets of her unquestionable influence, at first sight, upon the
fancy of every man of taste who beheld her.

Mr. Marston's fortune, never very large, had been shattered by early
dissipation. Naturally of a proud and somewhat exacting temper, he
actively felt the mortifying consequences of his poverty. The want of
what he felt ought to have been his position and influence in the county
in which he resided, fretted and galled him; and he cherished a resentful
and bitter sense of every slight, imaginary or real, to which the same
fruitful source of annoyance and humiliation had exposed him. He held,
therefore, but little intercourse with the surrounding gentry, and that
little not of the pleasantest possible kind; for, not being himself in a
condition to entertain, in that style which accorded with his own ideas
of his station, he declined, as far as was compatible with good breeding,
all the proffered hospitalities of the neighborhood; and, from his wild
and neglected park, looked out upon the surrounding world in a spirit of
moroseness and defiance, very unlike, indeed, to that of neighborly
good-will.

In the midst, however, of many of the annoyances attendant upon crippled
means, he enjoyed a few of those shadowy indications of hereditary
importance, which are all the more dearly prized, as the substantial
accessories of wealth have disappeared. The mansion in which he dwelt
was, th