“Home!” sighed the youth.  “The wide world is my home, the suffering children of humanity my lawful kinsmen.”

Seeing his uncle’s lip quiver, he took his hand and affectionately pressed it between his own, while the tears he could not repress fell freely from his eyes.  “Father of my heart! would that in this hour of your adversity I could repay to you all your past kindness.  But cheer up, something may yet be done.  My legitimate father has never seen me as a man.  I will go to him.  I will plead with him on your behalf, until nature asserts her rights, and the streams of hidden affection, so long pent up in his iron heart, overflow and burst asunder these bars of adamant.  Uncle, I will go to him this very day, and may God grant me success!”

“It is in vain, Anthony.  Avarice owns no heart, has no natural affections.  You may go, but it is only to mortify your pride, agonize your feelings, and harden your kind nature against the whole world, without producing any ultimate benefit to me.”

“It is a trial, uncle, but I will not spare myself.  Duty demands the attempt, and successful or unsuccessful, it shall be made.”

He strode towards the door.  Algernon called him back.  “Do not stay long, Tony.  I feel ill and low spirited.  Godfrey surely does not know that I am in this accursed place.  Perhaps he is ashamed to visit me here.  Poor lad, poor lad!  I have ruined his prospects in life by my extravagance, but I never thought that it would come to this.  If you see him on your way, Anthony, tell him (here his voice faltered), tell him, that his poor old father pines to see him, that his absence is worse than imprisonment—­than death itself.  I have many faults, but I love him only too well.”

This was more than Anthony could bear, and he sprang out of the room.

With a heart overflowing with generous emotions, and deeply sympathising in his uncle’s misfortunes, he mounted a horse which he had borrowed of a friend in the neighborhood, and took the road that led to his father’s mansion; that father who had abandoned him, while yet a tender boy, to the care of another, and whom he had never met since the memorable hour in which they parted.

Oak Hall was situated about thirty miles from Norgood Park, and it was near sunset when Anthony caught the first glimpse of the picturesque church of Ashton among the trees.  With mingled feelings of pride, shame, and bitterness he rode past the venerable mansion of his ancestors, and alighted at the door of the sordid hovel that its miserable possessor had chosen for a home.

The cottage in many places had fallen into decay, and admitted through countless crevices the wind and rain.  A broken chair, a three-legged stool, and the shattered remains of an oak table, deficient of one of its supporters, but propped up with bricks, comprised the whole furniture of the wretched apartment.