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694 whom spotless honor was the all in all; and who had gone through life with bitter sorrows, but reverencing that race, and vindicating that honor: Fairthorn's eye would tremble—his eyes flash on her while he talked. She, poor child, could not divine why; but she felt that he was angry with her—speaking at her. In fact, Fairthorn's prickly tongue was on the barbed point of exclaiming, "And how dare you foist yourself into this unsullied lineage!—how dare you think that the dead would not turn in their graves ere they would make room in the vault of the Darrells for the daughter of a Jasper Losely!" But though she could not conceive the musician's covert meaning in these heraldic discourses, Sophy, with a justness of discrimination that must have been intuitive, separated from the more fantastic declamations of the grotesque genealogist that which was genuine and pathetic in the single image of the last descendant in a long and gradually-falling race, lifting it up once more into power and note on toiling shoulders, and standing on the verge of age, with the melancholy consciousness that the effort was successful only for his fleeting life; that, with all his gold, with all his fame, the hope which had achieved alike the gold and the fame was a lying mockery, and that name and race would perish with himself when the earth yawned for him beside the antiquary's grave. And these recitals made her conceive a more soft and tender interest in Guy Darrell than she had before admitted; they accounted for the mournfulness on his brow; they lessened her involuntary awe of that stateliness of bearing, which before had only chilled her as the evidence of pride.

While Fairthorn and Sophy thus matured acquaintance, Darrell and Waife were drawing closer and closer to each other. Certainly no one would be predisposed to suspect any congeniality of taste, intellect, experience, or emotion, between two men whose lives had been so widely different—in whose faults or merits the ordinary observer would have seen nothing but antagonism and contrast. Unquestionably their characters were strikingly dissimilar, yet there was that in each which the other recognized as familar to his own nature. Each had been the victim of his heart; each had passed over the plowshare of selfsacrifice. Darrell had offered up his youth—Waife his age;—Darrell to a Father and the unrequiting Dead—Waife to a Son whose life had become his terror. To one man, had been an idol; to the other,  had been a weed cast away into the mire. To the one man, unjoyous, evanescent glory—to the other, a shame that had been borne with a sportive cheerfulness, dashed into sorrow only when the world's contumely threatened