had
brought them on myself."

"Have _you_ suffered in this way, Henry? Oh, then, speak on,
for I shall understand you, I shall feel for you though no one
else in the world should."

"I know it, Ellen; I am persuaded of it. Circumstances have
raised a barrier between us, which ought never to have
existed; but there must always be a bond of sympathy in our
feelings which nothing ever can or will annihilate. Do you
remember that when I left college I went to Elmsley, and spent
three or four weeks there?"

"Yes, I do: it was then that you and Edward began to treat me
as a grown up woman, and that we took those long walks in the
country which first made me feel intimate with you both."

"It was," he resumed; "and those days were the last that I
ever spent free from care and anxiety. I sometimes look back
to them and live them over again in thought, till I long to
blot out from my life and my memory all that has intervened
between that time and this. But the one is not more impossible
than the other," he added with a sigh, and for a moment leant
his face on his hand, and remained silent. "Well," he resumed
after a pause, "I left Elmsley, and went to London; there I
immediately plunged into the wildest dissipation, and led a
life, the details of which I am ashamed to describe in
speaking to you. With an income scarcely sufficient to enable
me to live as a gentleman, I indulged in every species of
extravagance and lavish expenditure; but, above all, my
passion for gambling was at that time such, that it seemed to
me as if life was not worth having, without the means of
gratifying it. For weeks I lived in a state of continual
fever; my nights were turned into days; and, during the few
hours of sleep--but not of repose--which gave me strength to
return to the gaming-table, the rattling of the dice and the
shuffling of the cards haunted me in my dreams, with
alternations of exultation and despair, as vivid though not as
distinct, as in my waking hours. At first, (the old history of
all such cases,) I won immensely, and this encouraged me to
play higher and higher stakes, which, when the tide of fortune
turned, involved me, almost before I was conscious of it, in
debts of honour, far exceeding in amount what I could even
contemplate ever having the power to discharge. Still I played
on; a gleam of success now and then giving me a feverish hope
that I might regain at least a part of what I had lost. I
played on till the ca