In this condition of mind, though growing somewhat anxious as the moment of certainty approached, Horace, in strong but restrained excitement, pale with the fire that burned in his veins and withdrew the blood from his cheek, hastened from the City tavern, where he had found a lodging, round the quiet side of St. Paul's, to that strange old den of fortune, where tragic family secrets by the thousand lie recorded, and where the domestic history of a whole nation accumulates in silence. He disappeared beneath the archway, anxious yet confident; the blaze of his triumph ready to burst forth, his thoughts rushing forward in spite of him to the splendours which lay almost within reach, to his marriage with Amelia, to all the pleasures and domination of sudden wealth. An hour or two afterwards he came out again a different man. He had found his fortune--but it was passion, and not triumph, that burned in his downcast eyes. His face was no longer pale, but red with a sullen flush of impotent resentment and hatred. He went through the crowd elbowing his way like a man who had a quarrel with all the world; he went straight across the crowded streets, and pushed his way among waggons and omnibuses with a certain fierce defiance of accident, and impulse of opposition. When he got to his tavern, the first thing he did was to call a cab, into which he flung his little carpet-bag, as if that homely conveniency had done him mortal injury, and in a voice of passion desired to be driven instantly to the railway. Alas! that was no coach-and-six, either morally or visibly, in which Horace returned to Harliflax, and to the clerk's life in Mr. Stenhouse's office, which this morning he regarded with lordly and lofty disdain. He sat back, an image of silent and self-consuming rage, in his corner of the second-class railway carriage; rage which dried up every comfortable sensation out of his mind; rage at himself, who had been thus deceived; at the dead man who had left him, in the first place, this bitter vexation and disappointment, and at the living man, who lived to thwart him, and keep him out of his rightful possessions. Not a remorseful thought of the lifelong wrong which had soured his father's spirit and destroyed his life occurred to the congenial temper of his father's son. A true Scarsdale, Horace proved his legitimacy by the unmixed self-regard which plunged him into that sudden passion. From his own point of view he took up the expressions of his father's letter. They were rivals to the death. That event, long ago accomplished, which Horace knew for the first time to-day, had abrogated the bonds of nature between them at the very beginning of the son's life; and already a horrible impatience of the father's existence stole unawares over the mind of the young man. That lonely, miserable, misanthrope's life which the recluse endured at Marchmain kept the heir out of his inheritance--kept the youth from his