She was rather deaf, and seemed so stupid that Randal did not ask leave to enter and wait for Frank's return.

He therefore said briefly that he would just stroll on the lawn, and call again when church was over.
The old woman stared, and strove to hear him; meanwhile Randal turned round abruptly, and sauntered towards the garden side of the handsome old house.
There was enough to attract any eye in the smooth greensward of the spacious lawn, in the numerous parterres of variegated flowers, in the venerable grandeur of the two mighty cedars, which threw their still shadows over the grass, and in the picturesque building, with its projecting mullions and heavy gables; yet I fear that it was with no poet's nor painter's eye that this young old man gazed on the scene before him.
He beheld the evidence of wealth--and the envy of wealth jaundiced his soul.
Folding his arms on his breast, he stood a while, looking all around him, with closed lips and lowering brow; then he walked slowly on, his eyes fixed on the ground, and muttered to himself,-- "The heir to this property is little better than a dunce; and they tell me I have talents and learning, and I have taken to my heart the maxim, 'Knowledge is power.' And yet, with all my struggles, will knowledge ever place me on the same level as that on which this dunce is born?
I don't wonder that the poor should hate the rich.

But of all the poor, who should hate the rich like the pauper gentleman?
I suppose Audley Egerton means me to come into parliament, and be a Tory like himself?
What! keep things as they are! No; for me not even Democracy, unless there first come Revolution.

I understand the cry of a Marat,--'More blood!' Marat had lived as a poor man, and cultivated science--in the sight of a prince's palace." He turned sharply round, and glared vindictively on the poor old Hall, which, though a very comfortable habitation, was certainly no palace; and, with his arms still folded on his breast, he walked backward, as if not to lose the view, nor the chain of ideas it conjured up.
"But," he continued to soliloquize,--"but of revolution there is no chance.

Yet the same wit and will that would thrive in revolutions should thrive in this commonplace life.