And its exhibition was the more annoying, manifested, as it was, just at the moment when he had become most painfully aware that all his worldly possessions were beyond his control, and might pass from his reach forever.
"Can there be such baseness in the man ?" he exclaimed, mentally, with bitterness, as the thought flitted through his mind that Lyon had deliberately inveigled him, and, having been an instrument of his ruin, now turned from him with cold indifference.
"Impossible!" he replied, aloud, to the frightful conjecture.

"I will not cherish the thought for a single moment." But a suggestion like this, once made to a man in his circumstances, is not to be cast out of the mind by a simple act of rejection.

It becomes a living thing, and manifests its perpetual presence.

Turn his thought from it as he would, back to that point it came, and the oftener this occurred, the more corroborating suggestions arrayed themselves by its side.
Mr.Markland was alone in the library, with Mr.Lyon's hastily read letters before him, and yet pondering, with an unquiet spirit, the varied relations in which he had become placed, when the door was quietly pushed open, and he heard light footsteps crossing the room.
Turning, he met the anxious face of his daughter, who, no longer able to bear the suspense that was torturing her, had overcome all shrinking maiden delicacy, and now came to ask if, enclosed in either of his letters, was one for her.

She advanced close to where he was sitting, and, as he looked at her with a close observation, he saw that her countenance was almost colourless, her lips rigid, and her heart beating with an oppressed motion, as if half the blood in her body had flowed back upon it.
"Fanny, dear!" said Mr.Markland, grasping her hand tightly.