e character it was almost invariably a woman, not
a man; it was never a man past his early manhood. However varied their
circumstances and temperaments, they were in the main worldly and mean;
sometimes they were successful hypocrites, deceiving those nearest and
dearest to them.

It was a wholesome penance to him, perhaps, but it shook and troubled
his soul to its very depths. His sin had ruined the poor weakminded
drunkard, John Nixey, and hastened the end of dumb old Marlowe; these
consequences of it must, at any time, have clouded his own after-life.
But it had also wrought a baneful change in the spirit of the woman whom
he loved. It was he who had slain within her the hope, and the love, and
the faith in her fellow-men which had been needed for the full
perfecting of her genius.

CHAPTER XIV.

HIS FATHER'S SIN.

When Felix returned from his brief and clouded holiday to his work in
that corner of the great vineyard, so overcrowded with busy husbandmen
that they were always plucking up each others' plants, and pruning and
repruning each others' vines, till they made a wilderness where there
should have been a harvest, he found that his special plot there had
suffered much damage. John Nixey, following up the impression he had so
successfully made, had spread his story abroad, and found ears willing
to listen to it, and hearts willing to believe it. The small Provident
Club, instituted by Felix to check the waste and thriftlessness of the
people, had already, in his short absence, elected another treasurer of
its scanty funds; and the members who formed it, working men and women
who had been gathered together by his personal influence, treated him
with but scant civility. His evening lectures in the church
mission-house were sometimes scarcely attended, whilst on other days
there was an influx of hearers, among whom John Nixey was prominent,
with half-a-dozen rough and turbulent fellows like himself, hangers-on
at the nearest spirit-vaults, who were ready for any turn that might
lead to a row. The women and children who had been accustomed to come
stayed away, or went to some other of the numerous preaching-places, as
though afraid of this boisterous element in his little congregation.

Now and then, too, he heard his name called out aloud in the streets by
some of Nixey's friends, as he passed the prospering gin-palaces with
their groups of loungers about the doors; but though he could catch the
sound