"Look, Gabriella! Oh, he is a wreck, a melancholy wreck of a once noble man. Worn, haggard, gloomy, and despairing, he is the very personification of a sin-blasted being, a lost, ruined spirit. I had prepared myself for something mournful and degraded, but not for such a sight as this. O what an awful thing it is to give oneself up to the dominion of evil, till one seems to live, and move, and have their being in it! How awful to be consumed by slow, baleful fires, till nothing but smouldering ashes and smoking cinders are left! My God! Gabriella, I never realized before what _accursed_ meant." He started up, and walked up and down the room, just as Ernest used to do, unable to control the vehemence of his emotions. "Father!" he exclaimed, "how I could have loved, revered, adored my father, had he been what my youthful heart has so panted to embrace. I loved my mother,--Heaven knows I did; but there always seemed majesty as well as beauty in the name of father, and I longed to reverence, as well as to love. Mr. Clyde was a good man, and I honored him; he was my benefactor, and I was grateful to him,--but he wanted the intellectual grandeur, to which my soul longed to pay homage. I was always forming an image in my own mind of what a father should be,--pure, upright, and commanding,--a being to whom I could look up as to an earthly divinity, who could satisfy the wants of my venerating nature." "It is thus I have done," I cried, struck by the peculiar sympathy of our feelings. "In the dreams of my childhood, a vague but glorious form reigned with the sovereignty of a king and the sanctity of a high-priest, and imagination offered daily incense at its throne. Never, till I read my mother's history, was the illusion dispelled. But how did he welcome you, Richard? Surely he was glad and proud to find a son in you." "He is no longer capable of pride or joy. He is burnt out, as it were. But he did at last show some emotion, when made to believe that I was the son of Theresa." His hand trembled, and his hard, sunken eye momentarily softened. "Did you come here to mock and upbraid me?" he cried, concealing his sensibility under a kind of fierce sullenness. "What wrong have I done you? I deserted you, it is true, but I saved you from the influence of my accursed example, which might have dragged you to the burning jaws of hell. Go, and leave me to my doom. Leave me in the living grave my own unhallowed hands have dug. I want no sympathy, no companionship,--and least of all, yours. Every time I look on you, I feel as if coals of fire were eating in my heart." "Remorse, Richard," I exclaimed, "remorse! Oh! he feels. Our ministrations will not be in vain. Did you tell him that I was with you, that I came to comfort and to do him good?"