r the speech of ordinary men,
and discarded his former habiliments for the most conventional and
stylish clothes. Contact with the world had sharpened his native wit,
and given him a freedom among men and women, that was fast descending
into abandon. Success had stimulated his self-confidence and made him
prize those gifts by which he had once aroused the devotion of adoring
worshipers in the Quaker meeting house; he soon found that they could be
used to victimize the crowds which gathered around the flare of the
torch in the public square.

That which his friends had once dignified by the name of spiritual power
had deteriorated into something but little above animal magnetism. He
had learned to cherish a profound contempt for men and morals, and the
shrewd maxims which the quack had instilled into his mind became the
governing principles of his conduct. Those qualities which he had
inherited from his dissolute father, and which had been so long
submerged, were upheaved, while all that he had received from his mother
by birth and education sank out of sight and memory. Three elemental
passions assumed complete possession of his soul--the love of
admiration, of gambling and of the gypsy.

A transformation of an exactly opposite character had been taking place
in Pepeeta. Under the sunshine of David's love, and the dew of those
spiritual conceptions which had fallen upon her thirsty spirit, the
seeds of a beautiful nature, implanted at her birth, germinated and
developed with astonishing rapidity. Walking steadily in such light as
fell upon her pathway and ever looking for more, her spiritual vision
became clearer and clearer every day; and while this affection for God
purified her soul, her love for David expanded and transformed her
heart. Her unbounded admiration for him blinded her to that process of
deterioration in his character which even the quack perceived. To her
partial eye a halo still surrounded the head of the young apostate. But
while these two new affections wrought this sudden transformation in the
gypsy and filled her with a new and exquisite happiness, the
circumstances of her life were such that this illumination could not but
be attended with pain, for it brought ever new revelations of those
ethical inconsistencies in which she discovered herself to be deeply if
not hopelessly involved.

There was, in the first place, the inevitable conflict between her new
sense of duty, and the life of deceptio