Lucius Davoren, Volume III by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mr. Sivewright received the news of his son's death like a Roman; yet Lucius felt that beneath this semblance of stoicism there lurked keenest pain. With weak human nature's inconsistency the old man's memory now slid back to days long gone, before his son had become a scorpion-when the clever bright-faced child had seemed the one star of hope upon a joyless horizon.

‘He was such a promising child,' Homer Sivewright said to himself, as he sat by the hearth in the panelled parlour, absorbed in gloomy meditation, ‘and I hoped so much from him. How was it that he went astray? Was it innate wickedness, or his mother's evil teaching?'