Always actuated by generous impulses, but often rash in his determinations, and impetuous in their fulfilment; full of the warmest sensibility, hating that the meanest thing that breathed should endure pain, and feeling the most poignant sympathy for all suffering, Neville had been maddened by his own thoughts, while he brooded over the position in which Elizabeth was placed. Not one of those various circumstances that alleviate disaster to those who endure it, presented themselves to his imagination--he saw adversity in its most hideous form, without relief or disguise--names and images appending to Falkner's frightful lot, which he and Elizabeth carefully banished from their thoughts, haunted him. The fate of the basest felon hung over the prisoner--Neville believed that it must inevitably fall on him; he often wondered that he did not contrive to escape; that Elizabeth, devoted and heroic, did not contrive some means of throwing open his dungeon's doors. He had endeavoured to open his father's eyes, to soften his heart, in vain. He had exerted himself to discover whether any trace of long past circumstances existed that might tend to acquit Falkner. He had gone to Treby, visited the graves of the hapless parents of Elizabeth, seen Mrs. Baker, and gathered there the account of his landing; but nothing helped to elucidate the mystery of his mother's death; Falkner's own account was the only trace left behind; that bore the stamp of truth in every line, and appeared to him so honourable a tribute to poor Alithea's memory, that he looked with disgust on his father's endeavours to cast upon it suspicions and interpretations the most hideous and appalling. In the first instance, he had been bewildered by Sir Boyvill's sophistry, and half conquered by his plausible arguments. But a short time, and the very circumstance of Elizabeth's fidelity to his cause sufficed to show him the baseness of his motives, and the real injury he did his mother's fame.