.

DE STANCY.
I.
Captain De Stancy was a changed man.

A hitherto well-repressed energy was giving him motion towards long-shunned consequences.

His features were, indeed, the same as before; though, had a physiognomist chosen to study them with the closeness of an astronomer scanning the universe, he would doubtless have discerned abundant novelty.
In recent years De Stancy had been an easy, melancholy, unaspiring officer, enervated and depressed by a parental affection quite beyond his control for the graceless lad Dare--the obtrusive memento of a shadowy period in De Stancy's youth, who threatened to be the curse of his old age.

Throughout a long space he had persevered in his system of rigidly incarcerating within himself all instincts towards the opposite sex, with a resolution that would not have disgraced a much stronger man.