He had been riding fast; but he now drew in his rein, and suffered his horse to walk. The sun was setting gloriously, and the rich, rosy light, diffused through the air, gave every thing an aspect of warmth, and richness, and cheerfulness. But Marlow's heart was any thing but gay. Whether it was that the scenes which he had passed through in London, his visits to a prison, his dealings with hard official men, the toiling, moiling crowds that had surrounded him; the wearisome, eternal, yet ever-changing struggle of life displayed in the streets and houses of a capital, the infinite varieties of selfishness, and folly, and vice, and crime, had depressed his spirits, or that his health had somewhat suffered in consequence of anxious waiting for events in the foul air of the metropolis, I cannot tell. But certain, he was sadder than was usual with him. His was a spirit strong and active, naturally disposed to bright views and happy hopes, too firm to be easily depressed, too elastic to be long kept down. But yet, as he rode along, there was a sort of feeling of apprehension upon his mind that oppressed him mightily. He revolved all that had lately passed. He compared the state of Mr. Hastings' family, as it actually was, with what it had been when he first knew it, and there seemed to be a strange mystery in the change. It had then been all happiness and prosperity with that household; a calm, grave, thoughtful, but happy father and husband; a bright, amiable, affectionate mother and wife; a daughter, to his mind the image of every thing that was sweet, and gentle, and tender--of every thing that was gay, and sparkling, and cheerful; full of light and life, and fancy, and hope. Now, there was a father in prison, deprived of his greatest share of worldly prosperity, cast down from his station in society, gloomy, desponding, suspicious, and, as it seemed to him, hardly sane: a mother, irritable, capricious, peevish, yielding to calamity, and lying on a bed of sickness, while the bright angel of his love remained to nurse, and tend, and soothe the one parent, with a heart torn and bleeding for the distresses of the other. "What have they done to merit all this?" he asked himself. "What fault, what crime have they committed to draw down such sorrows on their heads? None--none whatever. Their lives had been spent in kindly acts and good deeds; they had followed the precepts of the religion they professed; their lives had been spent in doing service to their fellow-creatures, and making all happy around them." Then again, on the other hand, he saw the coarse, and the low, and the base, and the licentious prosperous and successful, rising on the ruins of the pure and the true. Wily schemes and villanous intrigues obtaining every advantage, and honesty of purpose and rectitude of action frustrated and cast down.