In this man’s breast lay, concealed by his external calm, those memories and aspirations which are as strong as passions. In his earlier years, when he had been put to hard shifts for existence, he had found no leisure for close and brooding reflection upon that spoliation of just rights--that calumny upon his mother’s name, which had first brought the Night into his Morning. His resentment towards the Beauforts, it is true, had ever been an intense but a fitful and irregular passion. It was exactly in proportion as, by those rare and romantic incidents which Fiction cannot invent, and which Narrative takes with diffidence from the great Store-house of Real Life, his steps had ascended in the social ladder--that all which his childhood had lost--all which the robbers of his heritage had gained, the grandeur and the power of WEALTH--above all, the hourly and the tranquil happiness of a stainless name, became palpable and distinct. He had loved Eugenie as a boy loves for the first time an accomplished woman. He regarded her, so refined--so gentle--so gifted, with the feelings due to a superior being, with an eternal recollection of the ministering angel that had shone upon him when he stood on the dark abyss. She was the first that had redeemed his fate--the first that had guided aright his path--the first that had tamed the savage at his breast:--it was the young lion charmed by the eyes of Una. The outline of his story had been truly given at Lord Lilburne’s. Despite his pride, which revolted from such obligations to another, and a woman--which disliked and struggled against a disguise which at once and alone saved him from the detection of the past and the terrors of the future--he had yielded to her, the wise and the gentle, as one whose judgment he could not doubt; and, indeed, the slanderous falsehoods circulated by the lackey, to whose discretion, the night of Gawtrey’s death, Eugenie had preferred to confide her own honour, rather than another’s life, had (as Liancourt rightly stated) left Philip no option but that which Madame de Merville deemed the best, whether for her happiness or her good name. Then had followed a brief season--the holiday of his life--the season of young hope and passion, of brilliancy and joy, closing by that abrupt death which again left him lonely in the world.