Explore "Foxglove Manor, Volume II" by Robert W. Buchanan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was a chill day in early autumn, and as Charles Santley passed along the dark avenue of the Manor his path was strewn here and there with freshly fallen leaves. Dark shadows lay on every side, and the heaven above was full of a sullen, cheerless light. It was just the day for a modern Faust, in the course of his noonday walk, to encounter, in some fancied guise, canine or human, the evil one of old superstition.
Be that as it may, Santley knew at last that the hour of his temptation was over, and that the evil one was not far away. He knew it, by the sullen acquiescence of evil of his own soul; by the deliberate and despairing precision with which he had chosen the easy and downward path; by the sense of darkness which already obliterated the bright moral instincts in his essentially religious mind. He had spoken the truth when he said he would follow Ellen Haldane anywhere, even to the eternal pit itself. Her beauty possessed him and disturbed him with the joy of impure thoughts; and now that he perceived his own power to trouble her peace of mind, he rejoiced at the strength of his passion with a truly diabolic perversity.