CHAPTER II.—THE WORM UPON THE LEAF.
I’ll tell thee what, my friend,
He is a very serpent in my way;
And wheresoe’er this foot of mine doth tread
He lies before me. Dost thou understand me?
—Shakspere.
Sunshine still!
Sunbeams making a golden palace of a Gothic mansion in the Regent’s Park, gilding its fretted roof, its traceries, and its triple arched and ornamented windows, tinting the graceful trees which gently waved in the gardens before and behind it, scattering golden stars upon the lake, and investing the flowers and shrubs with a beauty which rendered the place around little less than an earthly paradise.
Sunshine and sunbeams in all places without the walls of the mansion—shadows within.
In a room, magnificently furnished, containing every appliance a morbid attention to personal comfort could need, or the invention of luxurious imagination could devise, were seated an elderly gentleman, his wife and three daughters.
One of these girls was a beauty—all had pretensions to good looks, but she was strikingly handsome.
The name of the owner of this mansion was Grahame. He was a pale, stern-looking man. A dress suit of black, and a white cravat, which seemed to have the effect of being unpleasantly and rather dangerously tight about his neck, added to the austerity of his aspect.