Ere he finally committed his mother to the profoundest vault of his soul, fain would he have drawn one poor alleviation from a circumstance, which nevertheless, impartially viewed, seemed equally capable either of soothing or intensifying his grief. His mother's will, which without the least mention of his own name, bequeathed several legacies to her friends, and concluded by leaving all Saddle Meadows and its rent-rolls to Glendinning Stanly; this will bore the date of the day immediately succeeding his fatal announcement on the landing of the stairs, of his assumed nuptials with Isabel. It plausibly pressed upon him, that as all the evidences of his mother's dying unrelentingness toward him were negative; and the only positive evidence--so to speak--of even that negativeness, was the will which omitted all mention of Pierre; therefore, as that will bore so significant a date, it must needs be most reasonable to conclude, that it was dictated in the not yet subsided transports of his mother's first indignation. But small consolation was this, when he considered the final insanity of his mother; for whence that insanity but from a hate-grief unrelenting, even as his father must have become insane from a sin-grief irreparable? Nor did this remarkable double-doom of his parents wholly fail to impress his mind with presentiments concerning his own fate--his own hereditary liability to madness. Presentiment, I say; but what is a presentiment? how shall you coherently define a presentiment, or how make any thing out of it which is at all lucid, unless you say that a presentiment is but a judgment in disguise? And if a judgment in disguise, and yet possessing this preternaturalness of prophecy, how then shall you escape the fateful conclusion, that you are helplessly held in the six hands of the Sisters? For while still dreading your doom, you foreknow it. Yet how foreknow and dread in one breath, unless with this divine seeming power of prescience, you blend the actual slimy powerlessness of defense? That his cousin, Glen Stanly, had been chosen by his mother to inherit the domain of the Meadows, was not entirely surprising to Pierre. Not only had Glen always been a favorite with his mother by reason of his superb person and his congeniality of worldly views with herself, but excepting only Pierre, he was her nearest surviving blood relation; and moreover, in his christian name, bore the hereditary syllables, Glendinning. So that if to any one but Pierre the Meadows must descend, Glen, on these general grounds, seemed the appropriate heir.