e; and betwixt her mother's death and her father's ignominy, his
daughter was left worse than orphaned.

There was no pursuit after Fauntleroy. His family connections, who had
great wealth, made such arrangements with those whom he had attempted
to wrong as secured him from the retribution that would have overtaken
an unfriended criminal. The wreck of his estate was divided among his
creditors: His name, in a very brief space, was forgotten by the
multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth to mouth. Seldom,
indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest former intimates. Nor
could it have been otherwise. The man had laid no real touch on any
mortal's heart. Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created by
the sunshine of prosperity, it was his law to vanish into the shadow of
the first intervening cloud. He seemed to leave no vacancy; a
phenomenon which, like many others that attended his brief career, went
far to prove the illusiveness of his existence.

Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally
melted into vapor. He had fled northward to the New England
metropolis, and had taken up his abode, under another name, in a
squalid street or court of the older portion of the city. There he
dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good
people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest. Many families were
clustered in each house together, above stairs and below, in the little
peaked garrets, and even in the dusky cellars. The house where
Fauntleroy paid weekly rent for a chamber and a closet had been a
stately habitation in its day. An old colonial governor had built it,
and lived there, long ago, and held his levees in a great room where
now slept twenty Irish bedfellows; and died in Fauntleroy's chamber,
which his embroidered and white-wigged ghost still haunted. Tattered
hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with many cracks and fissures, a
richly carved oaken mantelpiece, partly hacked away for kindling-stuff,
a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with great, unsightly patches of the naked
laths,--such was the chamber's aspect, as if, with its splinters and
rags of dirty splendor, it were a kind of practical gibe at this poor,
ruined man of show.

At first, and at irregular intervals, his relatives allowed Fauntleroy
a little pittance to sustain life; not from any love, perhaps, but lest
poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add more shame to that
with w