visitor, was not slow in
accepting the invitation, and, perhaps for the first time in his life,
Mordaunt was shaking hands with a stranger he had only known two days.

CHAPTER VI.

While yet a child, and long before his time,
He had perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness.
.....
But eagerly he read, and read again.
.....
Yet still uppermost
Nature was at his heart, as if he felt,
Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power
In all things that from her sweet influence
Might seek to wean him. Therefore with her hues,
Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms,
He clothed the nakedness of austere truth.
WORDSWORTH.

Algernon Mordaunt was the last son of an old and honourable race, which
had centuries back numbered princes in its line. His parents had had
many children, but all (save Algernon, the youngest) died in their
infancy. His mother perished in giving him birth. Constitutional
infirmity and the care of mercenary nurses contributed to render
Algernon a weakly and delicate child: hence came a taste for loneliness
and a passion for study; and from these sprung, on the one hand, the
fastidiousness and reserve which render us apparently unamiable, and, on
the other, the loftiness of spirit and the kindness of heart which are
the best and earliest gifts of literature, and more than counterbalance
our deficiencies in the "minor morals" due to society by their tendency
to increase our attention to the greater ones belonging to mankind. Mr.
Mordaunt was a man of luxurious habits and gambling propensities: wedded
to London, he left the house of his ancestors to moulder into desertion
and decay; but to this home Algernon was constantly consigned during
his vacations from school; and its solitude and cheerlessness gave to
a disposition naturally melancholy and thoughtful those colours which
subsequent events were calculated to deepen, not efface.

Truth obliges us to state, despite our partiality to Mordaunt, that,
when he left his school after a residence of six years, it was with the
bitter distinction of having been the most unpopular boy in it. Why,
nobody could exactly explain, for his severest enemies could not accuse
him of ill-nature, cowardice, or avarice, and these make the three
capital offences of a school-boy; but Algernon Mordaunt had already
acquired the knowledge of himself, and could explain the cause, though
with a bitter and swelling