ife, had been
rendered nervous with apprehension. To be sure, he was not one of the
"sleek-headed men that sleep o' nights"; he was always busy with some
scheme; but, heretofore, success had followed every plan, and he had
gone on with steadfast confidence. Now the keenest foresight was of
no avail; events defied calculation; misfortunes came without end and
without remedy. It was the moment of fate to him. He had gone to the
last verge, exhausted every resource, and, if there were not some help,
as unlooked for as a shower of gold from heaven, he must stop payment
--he, whose credit had been spotless and without limit, whose name in
the financial world was honor itself, whose influence had been a tower
of strength in every undertaking. It was not without a struggle that he
brought himself to look this inexorable fact in the face. Marcia and his
sister-in-law heard him as he paced the room through the night; they had
noticed his abstracted and downcast air the preceding evening; and at
breakfast the few words that escaped from between his firm-set lips were
sufficiently ominous. It was the first morning that Marcia had appeared
at the table, and in her feeble condition the apprehension of danger
was intense and overpowering. Mrs. Sandford tried in vain to change
the conversation, by significant glances towards the invalid; but the
brother was too much absorbed to notice anything outside of the gloomy
circle that hemmed him in. Muttering still of "ruin," "beggary," and
similar topics, so admirably adapted to cheer the convalescent, he
swallowed his breakfast like an animal, left the room without his usual
bland "good morning," and slammed the street-door after him.

A fit of hysterics was the natural consequence. The kind and sisterly
widow bore, rather than led, Marcia to an upper room, propped her with
pillows in an arm-chair, and employed every tender and womanly art to
soothe her excited nerves. Calmness came, but only with exhaustion.
The door-bell rang. Mrs. Sandford gave an inaudible direction to the
servant. But Marcia exclaimed, "It is George! I heard his step on the
pavement. I must see him. Let him in." Mrs. Sandford remonstrated to no
purpose, and then went to her own room.

It _was_ "George." He entered the room with a pale face, and a look
betokening both suffering and resolution. He was evidently struck by the
appearance of Miss Sandford, rightly judging that she was not able
to bear what he had come to t