return to France,--he would try for a more respectable mode
of existence. He had not found happiness in that liberty he had won,
nor room for the ambition that began to gnaw him, in those pursuits from
which his father had vainly warned him. His most reputable friend
was his old tutor; he would go to him. He went; but the tutor was now
married, and was himself a father,--and that made a wonderful alteration
in his practical ethics. It was no longer moral to aid the son in
rebellion to his father. Vivian evinced his usual sarcastic haughtiness
at the reception he met, and was requested civilly to leave the house.
Then again he flung himself on his wits at Paris. But there were plenty
of wits there sharper than his own. He got into some quarrel with the
police,--not, indeed, for any dishonest practices of his own, but from
an unwary acquaintance with others less scrupulous,--and deemed it
prudent to quit France. Thus had I met him again, forlorn and ragged, in
the streets of London.

Meanwhile Roland, after the first vain search, had yielded to the
indignation and disgust that had long rankled within him. His son had
thrown off his authority because it preserved him from dishonor. His
ideas of discipline were stern, and patience had been well-nigh crushed
out of his heart. He thought he could bear to resign his son to his
fate,--to disown him, and to say, "I have no more a son." It was in this
mood that he had first visited our house. But when, on that memorable
night in which he had narrated to his thrilling listeners the dark tale
of a fellow-sufferer's woe and crime,--betraying in the tale, to my
father's quick sympathy, his own sorrow and passion,--it did not need
much of his gentler brother's subtle art to learn or guess the whole,
nor much of Austin's mild persuasion to convince Roland that he had not
yet exhausted all efforts to track the wanderer and reclaim the erring
child. Then he had gone to London; then he had sought every spot which
the outcast would probably haunt; then had he saved and pinched from his
own necessities to have wherewithal to enter theatres and gaming-houses,
and fee the agencies of police; then had he seen the form for which he
had watched and pined, in the street below his window, and cried, in
a joyous delusion, "He repents!" One day a letter reached my uncle,
through his bankers, from the French tutor (who knew of no other means
of tracing Roland but through the house by which his salary