ost beside
myself,--with a grief that was mixed up with feelings of intense anger
and rage against her whom I looked upon as the author of my sufferings--
Mrs Clyde.

Min had been again sent down to the country, the very day on which I
received her heart-breaking letter. This I heard from my old friend,
dear little Miss Pimpernell, who tried vainly to console me. She
endeavoured to make me believe that "all would come right in the end,"
as she had prophesied before; but, I refused to be comforted. I could
not share her faith. I would not be sanguine any more; no, never any
more!

I saw Mrs Clyde at church the very next Sunday. I went there in the
hope that my darling might have returned, and that I would see her--not
from any religious feeling.

There was only her mother there, however.

I waited to accost her at the church door after the service was over.

"Oh, Mrs Clyde," I said, "do not be my enemy!"

But, she took no notice of me:--she cut me dead.

I was convinced that all was lost now.

It was of no use my longer attempting to fight against fate:--I gave up
hope completely;--and then--and then--

I went to the devil!

Rochefoucauld says in his pointed "Maxims" that--

"There is nothing so catching as example; nor is there ever great good
or ill done that does not produce its like. We imitate good actions
through emulation, and bad ones through the malignity of our nature,
which shame restrains and example emancipates."

That was my case now.

I suppose I had had it in me all along--the "black drop," as the Irish
peasants call it, of evil; and, that shame had hitherto prevented me
from plunging into the whirlpool of sinful indulgence that now drew me,
a willing victim, down into its yawning gulf of ruin and degradation.
That bar removed, however, I made rapid progress towards the beckoning
devil, who was waiting to receive me with open arms. I hastened along
that path, "where,"--as Byron has described from his own painful
experience--

"--In a moment, we may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,
And colour things to come with hues of night!"

I declare to you, that when I look back on this period of my life--life!
death, rather I should say, for it was a moral death--I am quite unable
to comprehend the motives that led me to take such a course. My eyes
were not blinded. I must have seen that each stride plac