Beholding, at this moment, a frank, brave, handsome youth by his side, full of talent and of promise, and singularly attractive in manner,--in whose veins, too, ran some of the same blood that filled his own, and whose features were moulded after the best ancestral type,--his dormant affections quickly awakened to fasten themselves pertinaciously around the timely object. His thoughts began industriously to shape out for himself a new future, which should embrace, as a setting its appropriate jewel, a brilliant and prosperous career for this young hope of his house. The unsuspected strength of these feelings now made itself clearly visible, both in the hearty grasp which he gave his nephew's hand, and in a sudden affectionateness of eyes, mouth, voice, gesture, and every indescribable manifestation, that Bergan had never seen in him before. Naturally enough, the young man shrank from the utterance of words certain to drive back on itself this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern nature, to bring back the old sharpness and severity to eyes that now lay so soft and deep under their shaggy brows. Moreover, he felt that his own resolution was wavering. Bergan Hall had grown strangely dear to him during his solitary occupation of its silent, but suggestive precincts. He might have been proof against every temptation that it could have offered in its grandeur and its prosperity; but in its loneliness and decay there was a pathetic appeal to much that was best and noblest in his nature. To this influence, a stronger one, even, was now added. Seeing the strength of his uncle's new-born affection, and its softening effect upon his face and manner, Bergan began to question within himself whether a still better and nobler work than the restoration of the ancestral home, might not here call for his hand--even the restoration of a human life. Those woful habits of intoxication and profanity, far worse than the dry-rot that gnawed at the timbers of the old Hall; that roughness and sordidness which had gathered over the once promising character, far sadder to behold than the mould and the dust that dimmed the ancestral grandeur;--were there not moral instruments available for the cure of the one, as there were artisan's tools able to remove all traces of the other.