The ire of the angered and vindictive man had, however, begun sensibly to abate, and old thoughts, memories, duties, suggested partly by the blank which Lucy’s absence made in his house, partly by remembrance of the solemn promise he had made her mother, were strongly reviving in his mind, when he read the announcement of marriage in a provincial journal, directed to him, as he believed, in the bride’s hand-writing; but this was an error, her sister having sent the newspaper.  Mr. Lisle also construed this into a deliberate mockery and insult, and from that hour strove to banish all images and thoughts connected with his cousin, from his heart and memory.

He unfortunately adopted the very worst course possible for effecting this object.  Had he remained amid the buzz and tumult of active life, a mere sentimental disappointment, such as thousands of us have sustained and afterwards forgotten, would, there can be little doubt, have soon ceased to afflict him.  He chose to retire from business, visited Watley, and habits of miserliness growing rapidly upon his cankered mind, never afterwards removed from the lodgings he had hired on first arriving there.  Thus madly hugging to himself sharp-pointed memories, which a sensible man would have speedily cast off and forgotten, the sour misanthrope passed a useless, cheerless, weary existence, to which death must have been a welcome relief.

Matters were in this state with the morose and aged man—­aged mentally and corporeally, although his years were but fifty-eight—­when Mr. Flint made Mr. Jennings’s acquaintance.  Another month or so had passed away when Caleb’s attention was one day about noon claimed by a young man dressed in mourning, accompanied by a female similarly attired, and from their resemblance to each other he conjectured were brother and sister.  The stranger wished to know if that was the house in which Mr. Ambrose Lisle resided.  Jennings said it was; and with civil alacrity left his stall and rang the front-door bell.  The summons was answered by the landlady’s servant, who, since Esther May’s death, had waited on the first-floor lodger; and the visitors were invited to go up stairs.  Caleb, much wondering who they might be, returned to his stall, and from thence passed into his eating and sleeping-room just below Mr. Lisle’s apartments.  He was in the act of taking a pipe from the mantel-shelf, in order to the more deliberate and satisfactory cogitation on such an unusual event, when he was startled by a loud shout, or scream rather, from above.  The quivering and excited voice was that of Mr. Lisle, and the outcry was immediately followed by an explosion of unintelligible exclamations from several persons.  Caleb was up stairs in an instant, and found himself in the midst of a strangely-perplexing and distracted scene.  Mr. Lisle, pale as his shirt, shaking in every limb, and his eyes on fire with passion, was hurling forth a torrent of vituperation and reproach at the young woman, whom he evidently