Seeing how perfectly these twain of their ancestors were reflected in his mother and uncle, not only in features, but also in character, Bergan was suddenly seized with a nightmare of doubt and questioning. Was a man's good or evil, then, a mere matter of inheritance, an inevitable heirloom, handed down to him from a remote ancestry, by a more effectual law of transmission than has ever been established, in respect to more tangible property? If so,--if the defects and weaknesses, the depraved tastes and ungovernable passions, which characterized the father were inevitably passed on to the son, and the son's son,--if the moral disease under which this man groaned, as well as the sweet temper which made that woman a household sunbeam, were to be surely traced back to their ancestor of a hundred years ago; what became of individual worth, individual shame, and individual accountability? Bergan shrank from the apparently inevitable conclusion. He felt, with an unutterable horror, its snaky coils tightening around him, squeezing the breath out of every noble aim and aspiration. He could only escape from it by an appeal from his reason to his consciousness. "If," he asked himself, "I should now take that grim picture from the wall, and thrust it into the fire, in revenge for the pain which it has given me, should I not know, despite all reasoning to the contrary, that I--I alone, and not that bearded Sir Harry, was responsible for the foolish act? Certainly, I should; for whatever else he may have sent down to me, he did not give me either my will or my conscience. These are my own, and never Bergan of them all had them before me!" And he drew a long breath of relief. His attention was now directed to the portrait of a young girl, at the end of the second row, nearest the window. It had an odd, illusive resemblance to some one that he had known,--a singular likeness in unlikeness, which puzzled while it attracted him. All at once, capturing the fleeting, familiar expression, as it were, by a swift side-glance, he recognized it as that portrait of his mother in her youth, of which Major Bergan had spoken. He stood gazing upon it long and earnestly, yet with a strange, undefinable feeling of sadness, too. For this bright, young being, with the smooth brow, the arch, dimpled face, and the unwakened soul dreaming at the depths of the soft eyes, was, after all, a stranger to him,--a being that he had never known, and never could know, any more than if she had been laid years ago under the sod, and her sweet substance gradually transformed into violets and daisies. He went back to the picture of Lady Eleanor, and felt, with a thrill of gladness, that he had found again the mother that he seemed, for a brief space, to have lost.