his own
high-born pupil was enabled to unmask, and his disgrace was visited on
me. I left my bed to find my uncle (all disguise over) an avowed partner
in a hell, and myself blasted alike in name, love, past, and future.
And then, Philip--then I commenced that career which I have trodden
since--the prince of good-fellows and good-for-nothings, with ten
thousand aliases, and as many strings to my bow. Society cast me off
when I was innocent. Egad, I have had my revenge on society since!--Ho!
ho! ho!"

The laugh of this man had in it a moral infection. There was a sort of
glorying in its deep tone; it was not the hollow hysteric of shame and
despair--it spoke a sanguine joyousness! William Gawtrey was a man whose
animal constitution had led him to take animal pleasure in all things:
he had enjoyed the poisons he had lived on.

"But your father--surely your father--"

"My father," interrupted Gawtrey, "refused me the money (but a small
sum) that, once struck with the strong impulse of a sincere penitence,
I begged of him, to enable me to get an honest living in a humble trade.
His refusal soured the penitence--it gave me an excuse for my career and
conscience grapples to an excuse as a drowning wretch to a straw. And
yet this hard father--this cautious, moral, money-loving man, three
months afterwards, suffered a rogue--almost a stranger--to decoy
him into a speculation that promised to bring him fifty per cent. He
invested in the traffic of usury what had sufficed to save a hundred
such as I am from perdition, and he lost it all. It was nearly his whole
fortune; but he lives and has his luxuries still: he cannot speculate,
but he can save: he cared not if I starved, for he finds an hourly
happiness in starving himself."

"And your friend," said Philip, after a pause in which his young
sympathies went dangerously with the excuses for his benefactor; "what
has become of him, and the poor girl?"

"My friend became a great man; he succeeded to his father's peerage--a
very ancient one--and to a splendid income. He is living still. Well,
you shall hear about the poor girl! We are told of victims of seduction
dying in a workhouse or on a dunghill, penitent, broken-hearted, and
uncommonly ragged and sentimental. It may be a frequent case, but it is
not the worst. It is worse, I think, when the fair, penitent, innocent,
credulous dupe becomes in her turn the deceiver--when she catches vice
from the breath upon which she has