But under all these cruel circumstances her health was daily injured, and she who had been full of bloom, and life, and health, became pale, and worn, and thin, and unequal to the least exertion. Sir Francis and Lady Tyrrell had but one child, a son, who was born in the second year of their marriage; but of that son, for various reasons, it will be necessary to speak apart. CHAPTER II. It is a terrible thing when youth--the time of sport and enjoyment, the period which nature has set apart for acquiring knowledge, and power, and expansion, and for tasting all the multitude of sweet and magnificent things which crowd the creation, in their first freshness and with the zest of novelty--is clouded with storms or drenched with tears. It is not so terrible by any means when the mere ills of fortune afflict us; for they are light things to the buoyancy of youth, and are soon thrown off by the heart which has not learned the foresight of fresh sorrows. The body habituates itself more easily to anything than the mind, and privations twice or thrice endured are privations no longer. But it is a terrible thing, indeed, when--in those warm days of youth when the heart is all affection, the mind longing for thrilling sympathies, the soul eager to love and be beloved--the faults, the vices, or the circumstances of others cut us off from those sweet natural ties with which nature, as with a wreath of flowers, has garlanded our early days; when we have either lost and regret, or known but to contemn, the kindred whose veins flow with the same blood as our own, or the parents who gave us being. There are few situations more solitary, more painful, more moving, than that of an orphan. I remember a schoolfellow who had many friends who were kind to him and fond of him: but he said to me one day, in speaking of his holiday sports, "I, you know, have no father or mother." And there was a look of thoughtful melancholy in his face, and a tone of desolation in his voice, which struck me strangely, even young as I then was. But that situation, lonely as it is, deprived of all the tender and consoling associations of kindred feeling, is bright and cheerful, gay and happy, compared with that in which Charles Tyrrell commenced his career on earth. He was as beautiful a child as ever was seen; strong vigorous, and healthy; with his mother's fair complexion, a fine, intelligent countenance, even in infancy and a smile of peculiar sweetness. His father was fond of him as long as he continued an infant. He was proud of him, I was going to say, but I believe the proper term would be, conceited of him. Everybody admired the child, and expressed their admiration, and, by some strange complication of ideas, the admiration seemed to the father reflected back upon himself. The child amused him too, and interested him, and for a certain time he seemed to derive a pleasure from caressing it, which softened his manner, if not his feelings.