Bergan Arling, on quitting his uncle, had flung himself into the surrounding darkness, without aim, without hope; conscious only of an intolerable burden of grief and despair. Coming to the river, he had mechanically strode down its bank. Mechanically, too, he had crossed the foot-bridge, when it came in his way; and was scarcely aware that its last rotten plank¹, on the Hall end, had given away under his feet, and that he had narrowly missed being precipitated² into the water. In due time, he found himself standing³ before the deserted⁴ mansion⁵, looking up to its dark front with eyes just beginning to be capable of intelligent vision, and acknowledging to himself that, though his path had been but blindly chosen, it had brought him to a fitting goal.

"A ruined home, and a ruined life," he murmured, with a kind of bitter mournfulness,—"they will suit each other well!"

The door was locked, but there was a dilapidated flight of steps leading to the rotten upper piazza⁷, and the window of his old room yielded readily to pressure. The lamp, too, was in its remembered place, and, having lighted it, he threw himself into a chair, to sum up the record of his past life, and strike the balance.

Not that he did this consciously. Although he felt intuitively that he had reached a turning-point in his path, from whence its course and circumstance, if not its aim, might well be changed, it was with the future only—the consideration of the question what to do next—that he purposed to occupy himself. But the sight of the familiar room, and the ancient furniture and ornaments⁸ wherewith he had filled it, having inevitably⁹ recalled the period of his first occupancy, and the occasion of his sudden departure, he could not fail to see how all his life since had seemed to hinge on that one deplorable incident. Had he resisted Major Bergan's will in the single particular of entering that

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