It was the Sunday afternoon after these visits to the ancestor and to the group in the Commercial Road. Leonard was slowly returning home after a solitary lunch. He walked with drooping head, touching the lamp-posts as he passed with his umbrella. This, as everybody knows, is a certain sign of preoccupation and dejection. He was becoming, in fact, conscious of a strange obsession of his soul. The Family History sat upon him like a nightmare: it left him not either by day or by night. He was beginning to realise that he could not shake it off, and that it was come to stay. When a man is born to a Family History, and has to grow up with it, in full consciousness of it, he generally gets the better of it, and either disregards it or treats it with philosophy, or laughs at it, or even boasts of it. The illustrious Mr. Bounderby was one of the many who boast of it. But, then, he had grown up with it, and it had become part of him, and he was able to present his own version of it. Very different is the case when a man has a Family History suddenly and quite unexpectedly sprung upon him. What could have been more desirable than the position of this young man for a whole quarter of a century? Sufficiently wealthy, connected for generations with gentlefolk, successful, with nothing whatever to hamper him in his career, with the certainty of succeeding to a large property--could mortal man desire more? And then, suddenly, a Family History of the darkest and most gloomy kind--murder, sudden death, suicide, early death, the shattering of a strong mind, bankruptcy, poverty, cousins whom no kindliness could call presentable--all this fell upon him at one blow. Can one be surprised that he touched the lamp-posts as he went along? Is it wonderful that he could not get rid of the dreadful story? It occupied his whole brain; it turned everything else out--the great economical article for the _Nineteenth Century_, all his books, all his occupations. If he read in the printed page, his eyes ran across the lines and up and down the lines, but nothing reached his brain. The Family History was a wall which excluded everything else; or it was a jealous tenant who drove every intruder out as with a broom. If he tried to write, his pen presently dropped from his fingers, for the things that lay on his brain were not allowed by that new tenant to escape. And all night long, and all day long, pictures rose up and floated before his eyes; terrible pictures--pictures of things that belonged to the History; pictures that followed each other like animated photographs, irrepressible, not to be concealed, or denied, or refused admission. This obsession was only just beginning: it intended to become deeper and stronger: it was going to hold him with grip and claw, never to let him go by night or day until---- But the end he could not understand.