The difficult and painful situation in which he was placed also; the necessity of sacrificing one child to another; the struggle to do justice to one for whom he felt deep gratitude and esteem, when opposed by the claims of old affection and long-nourished tenderness; the knowledge that disgrace would fall upon his name, and, like the yellow lichen on a tombstone, would live and flourish, and render indistinct every record of his life, when all below had mouldered away into dust; all joined together to make him feel most poignantly and bitterly that the last dark hour of life, when the bright sun that has lighted us through the morning of our youth and the mid-day of our manhood, and even shone warmly on the evening of our decline, has gone down behind the horizon, leaving but a few faint rays in the sky behind, is not the time to seek our way back into the light path which we have abandoned in the splendid noon of our existence; and that even if we do regain it at last, it must be by plunging into the thorns and briars of grief, regret, and remorse, without hesitation, though with difficulty and agony itself. It was not that even in those last hours of his life the Earl of Danemore looked upon death with any feeling of terror. Such sensations were not within the grasp of his nature; he knew not what fear meant. He might see and know that there was danger in this thing or in that; he might fix his eyes even upon death itself, and the retributive future after death; but still while gazing on the frowning brow of fate, and comprehending all which that dark inevitable countenance menaced, he strode on undaunted, and said, even to Omnipotence, "Strike!" No! it was not that anything like fear affected him; but weakened in body and wearied in mind with a long struggle against many internal adversaries, he listened to the voice of conscience and of equity, making itself heard through the medium of a judgment naturally strong and acute--making itself heard not the less distinctly in the silence of exhausted passions, because in former times the small still voice had been drowned amidst their contending fury.