ed my lips to mortal man. Now will I connect together
some matters which you may have heard piecemeal from others."

"What others are they?"

"Dr. Chillingworth, and he who once officiated as a London hangman."

"I have heard something from those quarters."

"Listen then to me, and you shall better understand that which you have
heard. Some years ago, it matters not the number, on a stormy night,
towards the autumn of the year, two men sat alone in poverty, and that
species of distress which beset the haughty, profligate, daring man, who
has been accustomed all his life to its most enticing enjoyments, but
never to that industry which alone ought to produce them, and render
them great and magnificent."

"Two men; and who were they?"

"I was one. Look upon me! I was of those men; and strong and evil
passions were battling in my heart."

"And the other!"

"Was Marmaduke Bannerworth."

"Gracious Heaven! the father of her whom I adore; the suicide."

"Yes, the same; that man stained with a thousand vices--blasted by a
thousand crimes--the father of her who partakes nothing of his nature,
who borrows nothing from his memory but his name--was the man who there
sat with me, plotting and contriving how, by fraud or violence, we were
to lead our usual life of revelry and wild audacious debauch."

"Go on, go on; believe me, I am deeply interested."

"I can see as much. We were not nice in the various schemes which our
prolific fancies engendered. If trickery, and the false dice at the
gaming-table, sufficed not to fill our purses, we were bold enough for
violence. If simple robbery would not succeed, we could take a life."

"Murder?"

"Ay, call it by its proper name, a murder. We sat till the midnight hour
had passed, without arriving at a definite conclusion; we saw no plan of
practicable operation, and so we wandered onwards to one of those deep
dens of iniquity, a gaming-house, wherein we had won and lost thousands.

"We had no money, but we staked largely, in the shape of a wager, upon
the success of one of the players; we knew not, or cared not, for the
consequence, if we had lost; but, as it happened, we were largely
successful, and beggars as we had walked into that place, we might have
left it independent men.

"But when does the gambler know when to pause in his career? If defeat
awakens all the raging passions of humanity within his bosom, success
but feeds the great vice that has been there engendere