e. The glamour which an
unreasoning passion casts over even a dishonest act, if performed for
the sake of winning a beautiful woman, is no excuse in my own soul for
the evil to which I succumbed that day, nor shall it seem so to you.
Bare, hard, stern, the fact confronts me from the past, that at the
first call of temptation I fell; and with this blot on my character, you
will have to consider me--unhappy being that I am!

"I did not realize then, however, all that I had done. The operation
entered into by Mr. Delafield prospered, and in two months I had, as he
predicted, ten thousand dollars instead of five, in my possession.
Besides, I had just married Ona, and for awhile life was a dream of
delight and luxury. But there came a day when I awoke to an insight of
the peril I had escaped by a mere chance of the die. The money which I
had expected from my aunt's will, turned out to be amongst certain funds
that had been risked in speculation by some agent during her sickness,
and irrecoverably lost. The expression of her good-will was all that
ever came to me of the legacy upon which I had so confidently relied.

"I was sitting with my young wife in the pretty parlor of our new home,
when the letter came from my lawyer announcing this fact, and I never
can make you understand what effect it had upon me. The very walls
seemed to shrivel up into the dimensions of a prison's cell; the face
that only an hour before had possessed every conceivable charm for me,
shone on my changed vision with the allurement, but also with the
unreality of a will-o'-the-wisp. All that might have happened if the
luck, instead of being in my favor, had turned against me, crushed like
a thunderbolt upon my head, and I rose up and left the presence of my
young wife, with the knowledge at my heart that I was no more nor less
than a thief in the eyes of God, if not in that of my fellow-men; a base
thief, who if he did not meet his fit punishment, was only saved from it
by fortuitous circumstances and the ignorance of those he had been so
near despoiling.

"The bitterness of that hour never passed away. The streets in which I
had been raised, the house which had been the scene of my temptation,
Mr. Delafield's face, and my own home, all became unendurable to me. I
felt as if each man I met must know what I had done; and secret as the
transaction had been, it was long before I could enter the bank without
a tremor of apprehension lest I should hear f