The day was sad and heavy. A low, drizzling rain, and labouring yet
settled clouds, which denied all glimpse of the sky, and seemed cursed
into stagnancy by the absence of all wind or even breeze, increased by
those associations we endeavour in vain to resist, the dark and oppressive
sadness of his thoughts.

He paused as he laid his hand on the door of the chamber: he listened; and
in the acute and painful life which seemed breathed into all his senses,
he felt as if he could have heard,--though without the room,--the very
breath of Constance; or known, as by an inspiration, the presence of her
beauty. He opened the door gently; all was silence and desolation for
him--Constance was not there!

He felt, however, as if that absence was a relief. He breathed more
freely, and seemed to himself more prepared for the meeting. He took his
station by the recess of the window: in vain--he could rest in no spot: he
walked to and fro, pausing only for a moment as some object before him
reminded him of past and more tranquil hours. The books he had admired
and which, at his departure, had been left in their usual receptacle at
another part of the house, he now discovered on the tables: they opened of
themselves at the passages he had read aloud to Constance: those pages, in
his presence, she had not seemed to admire; he was inexpressibly touched
to perceive that, in his absence, they had become dear to her. As he
turned with a beating heart from this silent proof of affection, he was
startled by the sudden and almost living resemblance to Constance, which
struck upon him in a full-length picture opposite--the picture of her
father. That picture, by one of the best of our great modern masters of
the art, had been taken of Vernon in the proudest epoch of his prosperity
and fame. He was portrayed in the attitude in which he had uttered one of