WYLDER'S HAjYD.
63
crooked, and wise in your own conceit. I am very uneasy
about it, whatever it is- / can't help it. It will happen
— and most ominously I feel that you are courting a
dreadful retaliation, and that you will bring on yourself a
great misfortune; but it is quite vain, I know, speaking
to you."
"Really, Radie, you're enough to frighten a poor fel-
low; you won't mind a word I say, and go on predicting
all manner of mischief between me and Wylder, the very
nature of which I can't surmise. Would you dislike my
smoking a cigar, Radie."
"Oh no," answered the young lady, with a little laugh
and a heavy sigb, for she knew it meant silence, and her
dark auguries grew darker.
To my mind there has always been something inexpres-
sibly awful in family feuds. The mystery of their origin
— their capacity for evolving latent faculties of crime —
and the steady vitality with which they survive the hearse,
and speak their deep-mouthed malignities in every new-
born generation, have associated them somehow in my
mind with a spell of life exceeding and distinct from hu-
man, and a special Satanic action.
My chamber, as I have mentioned, was upon the third
story. It was one of many, opening upon the long gal-
lery, which had been the scene, four generations back, of
that midnight duel which had laid one scion of this ancient
house in his shroud, and driven another a fugitive to the
moral solitudes of a continental banishment.
Much of the day, as I told you, had been passed among
the grisly records of these old family crimes and hatreds.
They had been an ill-conditioned and not a happy race.
When I heard the servant's step traversing that long gal-
lery, as it seemed to me in haste to be gone, and when all
grew silent, I began to feel a dismal sort of sensation, and