Diana Tempest, Volume I

Diana Tempest.
By Mary Cholmondeley, Author of The Danvers Jewels, Sir Charles Danvers, etc.
In Three Volumes. Vol. I.
London: Richard Bentley & Son, Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen. 1893. (All rights reserved.)
MY SISTER
HESTER.
He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak.
The lawyer's deed Ran sure, In tail, To them, and to their heirs Who shall succeed, Without fail, For evermore. Here is the land, Shaggy with wood, With its old valley, Mound and flood. But the heritors? ... Emerson, Earth-song .
La pire des mésalliances est celle du cœur.
COLONEL TEMPEST and his miniature ten-year-old replica of himself had made themselves as comfortable as circumstances would permit in opposite corners of the smoking carriage. It was a chilly morning in April, and the boy had wrapped himself in his travelling rug, and turned up his little collar, and drawn his soft little travelling cap over his eyes in exact, though unconscious, imitation of his father. Colonel Tempest looked at him now and then with paternal complacency. It is certainly a satisfaction to see ourselves repeated in our children. We feel that the type will not be lost. Each new edition of ourselves lessens a natural fear lest a work of value and importance should lapse out of print.
Colonel Tempest at forty was still very handsome; and must, as a young man, have possessed great beauty before the character had had time to assert itself in the face; before selfishness had learned to look out of the clear grey eyes, and a weak self-indulgence and irresolution had loosened the well-cut lips.
Colonel Tempest, as a rule, took life very easily. If he had fits of uncontrolled passion now and then, they were quickly over. If his feelings were touched, that was quickly over too. But to-day his face was clouded. He had tried the usual antidotes for an impending attack of what he would have called the blues, by which he meant any species of reflection calculated to give him that passing annoyance which was the deepest form of emotion of which he was capable. But Punch and the Sporting Times , and even the comic French paper which Archie might not look at, were powerless to distract him to-day. At last he tossed the latter out of the window to corrupt the morals of trespassers on the line, and, as it was, after all, less trouble to yield than to resist, settled himself in his corner, and gave way to a series of gloomy and anxious reflections.