Page:Paul Clifford Vol 3.djvu/152

144 the summer pomp of wood and heath-land, amidst which his noon-day visions had been nursed.

When he spoke of these scenes and days, his countenance softened, and something in its expression, recalling to Lucy the image of one still dearer, made her yearn to him the more. An ice seemed broken from his mind, and streams of released and gentle feelings, mingled with kindly and generous sentiment, flowed forth. Suddenly, a thought, a word, brought him back to the present—his features withered abruptly into their cold placidity, or latent sneer: the seal closed suddenly on the broken spell, and, like the victim of a fairy-tale, condemned, at a stated hour, to assume another shape, the very being you had listened to seemed vanished, and replaced by one whom you startled to behold. But there was one epoch of his life on which he was always silent, and that was, his first onset into the actual world—the period of his early struggle into wealth and fame. All that space of time seemed as a dark gulf, over which he had passed, and become changed at once—as a traveller landing on a strange climate may adopt, on the moment he touches its shore, its costume and its language.