Read "The Dear Departed" by Edgar Saltus online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Life is packed with pleasures. One of the most delightful is to awake with the consciousness of being in love. On the morning succeeding the rout Shane Wyvill awoke to just that delight. He was turbulently intoxicated by a girl whom he had never seen before, and whose name he did not know.
But the morning was a replica of others. Moreover, it was a family trait to wake up with that sensation. So far back as the family went, and it went as far back as any of the other families which Mr. Burke has so diligently catalogued, the Shane Wyvills -- the Shame Wyvills as custom had corrupted the name -- had, in love, been freebooters. Titularly lords of Cloden, typically they were a bad lot.