I am, I say, with an easier heart than I’ve had for many a day:  my son restored to me—­my daughter upon the point of being married according to my highest wishes—­all my projects prospering; and there is my brother’s wife—­wretched Lady Gourlay—­who, forsooth, is religious, benevolent, humane, and charitable—­ay, and if report speak true, who loves her fellow-creatures as much as I scorn and detest them.  Yes—­and what is the upshot?  Why, that all these virtues have not made her one whit happier than another, nor so happy as one in ten thousand. Cui bono, then I ask—­where is this moral machinery which I sometimes dreaded?  I cannot perceive its operations.  It has no existence; it is a mere chimera; like many another bugbear, the foul offspring of credulity and fear on the one side—­of superstition and hypocrisy on the other.  No; life is merely a thing of chances, and its incidents the mere combinations that result from its evolutions, just like the bits of glass in the kaleidoscope, which, when viewed naked, have neither order nor beauty, but when seen through our own mistaken impressions, appear to have properties which they do not possess, and to produce results that are deceptive, and which would mislead us if we drew any absolute inference from them.  Here the priest advances, kaleidoscope in hand, and desires you to look at his tinsel and observe its order.  Well, you do so, and imagine that the beauty and order you see lie in the things themselves, and not in the prism through which you view them.  But you are not satisfied—­you must examine.  You take the kaleidoscope to pieces, and where then are the order and beauty to be found?  Away!  I am right still.  The doctrine of life is a doctrine of chances; and there is nothing certain but death—­death, the gloomy and terrible uncreator—­heigho!”

Whilst the unbelieving baronet was congratulating himself upon the truth of his principles and the success of his plans, matters were about to take place that were soon to subject them to a still more efficient test than the accommodating but deceptive spirit of his own scepticism.  Lord Cullamore’s mind was gradually sinking under some secret sorrow or calamity, which he refused to disclose even to his son or Lady Emily.  M’Bride’s visit had produced a most melancholy effect upon him; indeed, so deeply was he weighed down by it, that he was almost incapable of seeing any one, with the exception of his daughter, whom he caressed and wept over as one would over some beloved being whom death was about to snatch from the heart and eyes forever.

Sir Thomas Gourlay, since the discovery of his son, called every day for a week, but the reply was, “His lordship is unable to see any one.”