His outward circumstances were as bitter as could well be to a high-minded man. He was a dependent on the grudging charity of one who abhorred him; and though he would right thankfully have gone out from these inhospitable doors, even to starve, in preference, yet was he bound to endure existence within them, by a promise which his mother had extorted from him as a condition of their marriage, that he never would leave Randolph Abbey without her consent. This marriage he knew was to save her from a blighting penury which was killing her; and, moreover, she concealed from him that cruel hatred of Sir Michael, which was the only heritage his dead father left him, and, thinking no evil, he had given them the promise which bound him as with an iron chain to abide under the roof of his unprovoked enemy. But heavier even than unjust hatred was the weight upon soul and body of his own deformity; for if the first shut up one human heart from him, and turned its power of affection to gall for his sake, the other cast him out for ever from the love of all human kind. He knew that his unsightly frame could call forth no other feeling from them but a cold, most often a contemptuous pity. And yet, when he looked out into the world--the dark, tumultuous, agonizing world--that very sea of human hearts, all beating up upon the stony shores of a life, against which they are for ever broken and shattered, he saw passing through the midst of it all a soft, pure light, shedding warmth and brightness even on the dreariest scenes, and causing men to forget all pain, and privation, and misery--a light to which the saddest eyes turned with a joyous greeting, and on which the gaze of the dying lingered mournfully, till the coffin-lid for ever shut it out from their fond longing. And he knew that this one blessed thing, which could overcome the strong, fierce evils of life, like the maid in the pride of her purity, before whom the lion would turn and flee, was called Human Love in the doting hearts of men--Human Love--the one sole, unfailing joy of our merely mortal existence. And was it for him? Should he ever have any share in it? Was its sweetness ever to be for his hungry and thirsty heart? Never! The seal was set upon him in his repulsive appearance, that he was to be an outcast from his fellow-men; his deformity was as a burden bound upon his back, with which he was driven out into the wilderness, there to abide in utter solitude of soul. The promise of life was abortive for him ere yet he had begun it.