As Markham was retiring, he met at the drawing-room door a strange mysterious-looking personage, dressed in black, and having a look of gloom and darkness far beyond any darkness of attire. The stranger fixed his eyes inquiringly on the young barrister, and by his looks seemed to rebuke the young man as an unwelcome intruder. Markham again looked at the stranger, not from wilful curiosity and voluntary impertinence, but almost through a power of fascination. Never had he seen a countenance of such singular and curious expression. It seemed not only unenglish, but unearthly. The eyes were large, flat, and lustreless; the cheeks long, narrow, pendulous, and sadly sallow; the nose aquiline; the forehead low and wrinkled; the hair thick and grizzled; the mouth wide, and the lips thin and pale; and the teeth long and irregular, and alternately black and yellow, like the keys of an old harpsichord. Markham sickened at the sight; he guessed what the stranger was; and so can our readers.
Markham had a long way to walk to reach his chambers. He went slowly, sorrowfully, and abstractedly. He thought over and over again of his troubles and disappointments. It was a painful thought to him, that just at the moment when his ambition of rising in the world seemed about to be gratified, he should find himself, by the misfortunes of his father, checked, thrown back, and humiliated. It could not but occur to his mind, that in order to gratify him, and to place him in a profession to which his genius and inclination directed him, his father and mother had made many sacrifices, and perhaps had impoverished themselves. He could, indeed, in a pecuniary point of view, repair the evil, at least in a great measure; but he could not heal the wounds of the spirit, which he saw that his father had so deeply felt. It was not in his power to recall the past, and restore health and spirits.
The young man also was perplexed and troubled on his own account. He had long cherished, though with some interruptions, the prospect of obtaining the hand of Clara Rivolta. He had, with a very pardonable, because very common conceit, pleased himself with the imagination that as the intellectual qualities of her mind were of a superior character, she was therefore most excellently well calculated for him; and he thought it a great pity that so intelligent a young woman should be sacrificed to such an empty coxcomb as Tippetson. We must pardon Markham for a little vanity: we are all of us vain of something; and those that are not vain of something, are vain of the absence of vanity.