red my life, I had become by the very shock
that followed the realization of my wrong-doing, a hungry-hearted,
eager-minded and melancholy-spirited man, asking but one boon in
recompense for my secret remorse, and that was domestic happiness and
the sympathetic affection of wife and children. Woman, according to my
belief, was born to be chiefly and above all, the consoler. What a man
missed in the outside world, he was to find treasured at home. What a
man lacked in his own nature, he was to discover in the delicate and
sublimated one of his wife. Beautiful dream, which my life was not
destined to see realized!

"The birth of my only child was my first great consolation. With the
opening of her blue eyes upon my face, a well-spring deep as my
unfathomable longing, bubbled up within my breast. Alas, that very
consolation brought a hideous grief; the mother did not love her child;
and another strand of the regard with which I still endeavored to
surround the wife of my youth, parted and floated away out of sight. To
take my little one in my arms, to feel her delicate cheek press
yearningly to mine, to behold her sweet infantile soul develop itself
before my eyes, and yet to realize that that soul would never know the
guidance or sympathy of a mother, was to me at once rapture and anguish.
I sometimes forgot to follow up a fortunate speculation, in my
indulgence of these feelings. I was passionately the father as I might
have been passionately the husband and the friend. Geraldine died; how
and with what attendant circumstances of pain and regret, I will not,
dare not state. The blow struck to the core of my being. I stood shaken
before God. The past, with its one grim remembrance--a remembrance that
in the tide of business successes and the engrossing affection which had
of late absorbed me, had been well-nigh swamped from sight--rose before
me like an accusing spirit. I had sinned, and I had been punished; I had
sown, and I had reaped.

"More than that, I was sinning still. My very enjoyment of the position
I had so doubtfully acquired, was unworthy of me. My very wealth was a
disgrace. Had it not all been built upon another man's means? Could the
very house I lived in be said to be my own, while a Japha existed in
want? In the eyes of the world, perhaps, yes; in my own eyes, no. I
became morbid on the subject. I asked myself what I could do to escape
the sense of obligation that overwhelmed me. The few sums with which