ccasion of humor
in other men, but it is safe to say that his own mind had never been
crossed by a single gleam of that illumining, revivifying flame. For
that reason he took his fate and himself more seriously, Heaven help
him!--than even his peculiar ill-fortune warranted.

At the time of his father's failure and disgrace he had been the
accepted suitor of a girl whom he idealized and adored, and in his
extremity she had failed him. She had weakly done as she was bid, and
broken faith with him. It was on this occasion that he laid upon himself
the burdensome task of which mention has been made.

"Frances," he had said, with the solemnity of a Capuchin friar taking
his vows; "Frances, if you cast me off I shall go to the devil!"

Frances was very sorry, and very reproachful, and withal, not a little
nattered by this evidence of her negative influence; but she gave him
her blessing and let him go, whither he would; and he, with the
inconsequent obstinacy of his nature, carried with him a perfectly
unimpaired ideal of her, sustained by her tearful assurance that she
should always love him and pray for him. Even when he heard within the
year that she was about to make a brilliant marriage with a titled
Frenchman whom she had met at Newport, he persisted in thinking of her
as the victim, not of her own inconstancy, but of parental sternness. He
sometimes saw her pretty face quite distinctly before his eyes, as he
looked out across the swiftly spinning wheel, into the smoke-hung
barroom,--the pretty face with the tearful eyes and the quivering lip of
shallow feeling, the sincerity of which nothing could have made him
doubt,--and somehow that pictured face had always the look of loving and
praying for him.

There was a certain little ring, bearing a design of a four-leaved
clover done in diamonds, a trinket of her girlhood days, which she used
to let him wear "for luck." He had it on his little finger the day his
father was sentenced. Its potency might fairly have been questioned
after that, yet when she took it back he felt as if the act must have a
blighting influence upon his destinies, quite apart from the broken
engagement which it marked.

He had accepted for the nonce a place at the foot of the ladder in a
bankers' and brokers' office which was offered him by one of the
partners, an old friend of his father's. He held the place for some
months, and, being quite devoid of ambition, he soon came to loathe the
dail