CHAPTER XIII.
Duties with wants, and facts with feelings jar,
Deceiving and deceived—what fools we are!
The hope is granted, and the wish content,
Alas! but only for our punishment.
Had Lady Lauriston been aware of Mr. Lorraine's certainty of succeeding to the Etheringhame estates and honours, her plans would have assumed a more appropriating form. Invalid in body, still more so in mind, the present earl was sinking to the grave, not less surely because the disease was more mental than physical—not less surely because he was young, for youth gave its own mortal keenness to the inward wound. It was curious that, while father and mother were cut out in the most common-place shapes of social automata, both sons possessed a romance of feeling which would greatly have alarmed their rational parents. But no moral perceptions are so blunt as those of the selfish; theirs is the worst of near-sightedness—that of the heart.
