ted, whether in extenuation
of the past or in hope of redemption in the future. And Austin has
inexpressibly soothed his brother. And Roland's ordinary roughness has
gone, and his looks are meek and his voice low. But he talks little, and
smiles never. He asks me no questions, does not to me name his son,
nor recur to the voyage to Australia, nor ask why it is put off, nor
interest himself, as before, in preparations for it,--he has no heart
for anything.

The voyage is put off till the next vessel sails, and I have seen Vivian
twice or thrice, and the result of the interviews has disappointed and
depressed me. It seems to me that much of the previous effect I
had produced is already obliterated. At the very sight of the great
Babel,--the evidence of the ease, the luxury, the wealth, the pomp;
the strife, the penury, the famine, and the rags, which the focus of
civilization, in the disparities of old societies, inevitably gathers
together,--the fierce, combative disposition seemed to awaken again; the
perverted ambition, the hostility to the world; the wrath, the scorn;
the war with man, and the rebellious murmur against Heaven. There
was still the one redeeming point of repentance for his wrongs to his
father,--his heart was still softened there; and, attendant on that
softness, I hailed a principle more like that of honor than I had yet
recognized in Vivian. He cancelled the agreement which had assured him
of a provision at the cost of his father's comforts. "At least there,"
he said, "I will injure him no more!"

But while on this point repentance seemed genuine, it was not so with
regard to his conduct towards Miss Trevanion. His gypsy nurture, his
loose associates, his extravagant French romances, his theatrical anode
of looking upon love intrigues and stage plots, seemed all to rise
between his intelligence and the due sense of the fraud and treachery he
had practised. He seemed to feel more shame at the exposure than at the
guilt, more despair at the failure of success than gratitude at
escape from crime. In a word, the nature of a whole life was not to be
remodelled at once,--at least by an artificer so unskilled as I.

After one of these interviews I stole into the room where Austin sat
with Roland, and watching a seasonable moment when Roland, shaking off
a revery, opened his Bible and sat down to it, with each muscle in his
face set, as I had seen it before, into iron resolution, I beckoned my
father from