"Dearest father, are you ill?" cried Elizabeth--for Falkner had turned ashy pale--but he commanded his voice to say that he was well, and left the room; a few minutes afterward he had left the house, and, seeking the most secluded pathways, walked quickly on as if to escape from himself. It would not do--the form of _her_ son was before him--a ghost to haunt him to madness. _Her_ son, whom she had loved with passion inexpressible, crazed by neglect and unkindness. Crazed he was not--every word he spoke showed a perfect possession of acute faculties--but it was almost worse to see so much misery in one so young. In person, he was a model of beauty and grace--his mind seemed formed with equal perfection; a quick apprehension, a sensibility, all alive to every touch; but these were nursed in anguish and wrong, and strained from their true conclusions into resentment, suspicion, and a fierce disdain of all who injured, which seemed to his morbid feelings all who named or approached him. Falkner knew that he was the cause of this evil. How different a life he had led, if his mother had lived! The tenderness of her disposition, joined to her great talents and sweetness, rendered her unparalleled in the attention she paid to his happiness and education. No mother ever equalled her--for no woman ever possessed at once equal virtues and equal capacities. How tenderly she had reared him, how devotedly fond she was, Falkner too well knew; and tones and looks, half forgotten, were recalled vividly to his mind at the sight of this poor boy, wretched and desolate through his rashness. What availed it to hate, to curse the father!--he had never been delivered over to this father, had never been hated by him, had his mother survived. All these thoughts crowded into Falkner's mind, and awoke an anguish, which time had rendered, to a certain degree, torpid. He regarded himself with bitter contempt and abhorrence--he feared, with a kind of insane terror, to see the youth again, whose eyes, so like _hers_, he had robbed of all expression of happiness, and clouded by eternal sorrow. He wandered on--shrouded himself in the deepest thickets, and clambered abrupt hills, so that, by breathless fatigue of body, he might cheat his soul of its agony. Night came on, and he did not return home. Elizabeth grew uneasy--till at last, on making more minute inquiry, she found that he had come back, and was retired to his room.