manly honest hearts were poor and
sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of
those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each
night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon
race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or
the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking,
not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched
and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one
town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the
noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to
drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and
never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands
urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very
cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest
bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of
life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they
would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could
scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he
or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice,
misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year
to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or
redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the
one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that
there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not
form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one
small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.

But youth is not prone to contemplate the darkest side of a picture
it can shift at will. By dint of reflecting on what he had to do, and
reviving the train of thought which night had interrupted, Nicholas
gradually summoned up his utmost energy, and when the morning was
sufficiently advanced for his purpose, had no thought but that of using
it to the best advantage. A hasty breakfast taken, and such affairs of
business as required prompt attention disposed of, he directed his steps
to the residence of Madeline Bray: whither he lost no time in arriving.

It had occurred to him that, very possibly, the young lady might be
denied, although to him she never had been; a