As Lord Cadurcis slowly directed his way through the woods and park of Cherbury, past years recurred to him like a faint yet pleasing dream.  Among these meads and bowers had glided away the only happy years of his boyhood, the only period of his early life to which he could look back without disgust.  He recalled the secret exultation with which, in company with his poor mother, he had first repaired to Cadurcis, about to take possession of what, to his inexperienced imagination, then appeared a vast and noble inheritance, and for the first time in his life to occupy a position not unworthy of his rank.  For how many domestic mortifications did the first sight of that old abbey compensate!  How often, in pacing its venerable galleries and solemn cloisters, and musing over the memory of an ancient and illustrious ancestry, had he forgotten those bitter passages of daily existence, so humbling to his vanity and so harassing to his heart!  Ho had beheld that morn, after an integral of many years, the tomb of his mother.  That simple and solitary monument had revived and impressed upon him a conviction that too easily escaped in the various life and busy scenes in which he had since moved, the conviction of his worldly desolation and utter loneliness.  He had no parents, no relations; now that he was for a moment free from the artificial life in which he had of late mingled, he felt that he had no friends.  The image of his mother came back to him, softened by the magical tint of years; after all she was his mother, and a deep sharer in all his joys and woes.  Transported to the old haunts of his innocent and warm-hearted childhood.  He sighed for a finer and a sweeter sympathy than was ever yielded by the roof which he had lately quitted; a habitation, but not a home.  He conjured up the picture of his guardian, existing in a whirl of official bustle and social excitement.  A dreamy reminiscence of finer impulses stole over the heart of Cadurcis.  The dazzling pageant of metropolitan splendour faded away before the bright scene of nature that surrounded him.  He felt the freshness of the fragrant breeze; he gazed with admiration on the still and ancient woods, and his pure and lively blood bubbled beneath the influence of the golden sunbeams.  Before him rose the halls of Cherbury, that roof where he had been so happy, that roof to which he had appeared so ungrateful.  The memory of a thousand acts of kindness, of a thousand soft and soothing traits of affection, recurred to him with a freshness which startled as much as it pleased him.  Not to him only, but to his mother, that mother whose loss he had lived to deplore, had the inmates of Cherbury been ministering angels of peace and joy.  Oh! that indeed had been a home; there indeed had been days of happiness; there indeed he had found sympathy, and solace, and succour!  And now he was returning to them a stranger, to fulfil one of the formal duties of society in paying them his cold respects; an attention which he could scarcely have avoided offering had he been to them the merest acquaintance, instead of having found within those walls a home not merely in words, but friendship the most delicate and love the most pure, a second parent, and the only being whom he had ever styled sister!