[Uncle Silas by J. S. LeFanu]@TWC D-Link bookUncle Silas CHAPTER III 1/8
_A NEW FACE_ I think it was about a fortnight after that conversation in which my father had expressed his opinion, and given me the mysterious charge about the old oak cabinet in his library, as already detailed, that I was one night sitting at the great drawing-room window, lost in the melancholy reveries of night, and in admiration of the moonlighted scene.
I was the only occupant of the room; and the lights near the fire, at its farther end, hardly reached to the window at which I sat. The shorn grass sloped gently downward from the windows till it met the broad level on which stood, in clumps, or solitarily scattered, some of the noblest timber in England.
Hoar in the moonbeams stood those graceful trees casting their moveless shadows upon the grass, and in the background crowning the undulations of the distance, in masses, were piled those woods among which lay the solitary tomb where the remains of my beloved mother rested. The air was still.
The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon, and the frosty stars blinked brightly.
Everyone knows the effect of such a scene on a mind already saddened.
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