hich he had already stained them. But he showed no tendency to
further guilt. His character appeared to have been radically changed
(as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable
fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the
same character, presenting itself in another phase. Instead of any
longer seeking to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to
shrink into the nearest obscurity, and to be unseen of men, were it
possible, even while standing before their eyes. He had no pride; it
was all trodden in the dust. No ostentation; for how could it survive,
when there was nothing left of Fauntleroy, save penury and shame! His
very gait demonstrated that he would gladly have faded out of view, and
have crept about invisibly, for the sake of sheltering himself from the
irksomeness of a human glance. Hardly, it was averred, within the
memory of those who knew him now, had he the hardihood to show his full
front to the world. He skulked in corners, and crept about in a sort
of noonday twilight, making himself gray and misty, at all hours, with
his morbid intolerance of sunshine.

In his torpid despair, however, he had done an act which that condition
of the spirit seems to prompt almost as often as prosperity and hope.
Fauntleroy was again married. He had taken to wife a forlorn,
meek-spirited, feeble young woman, a seamstress, whom he found dwelling
with her mother in a contiguous chamber of the old gubernatorial
residence. This poor phantom--as the beautiful and noble companion of
his former life had done brought him a daughter. And sometimes, as from
one dream into another, Fauntleroy looked forth out of his present
grimy environment into that past magnificence, and wondered whether the
grandee of yesterday or the pauper of to-day were real. But, in my
mind, the one and the other were alike impalpable. In truth, it was
Fauntleroy's fatality to behold whatever he touched dissolve. After a
few years, his second wife (dim shadow that she had always been) faded
finally out of the world, and left Fauntleroy to deal as he might with
their pale and nervous child. And, by this time, among his distant
relatives,--with whom he had grown a weary thought, linked with
contagious infamy, and which they were only too willing to get rid
of,--he was himself supposed to be no more.

The younger child, like his elder one, might be considered as the true
offspring of both parent