same youth, this time impatiently walking up and down a
close, dismal room. The furniture is smoke-dried and dusty, once red, now
of a dark ambiguous color. The sofa is of horse-hair, shining (almost
white in places) from constant friction. On the mantlepiece hangs a
looking-glass, the frame wrapped round with yellow gauze to protect it
from dirt and here and there a fly-catcher, suspended from the ceiling,
annoys the inmate of the dusky room by its constant motion. It is a
lodging-house, ready furnished, and the young man, who has not left his
home many months, is not yet accustomed to the change, and he is wearied
and unhappy. He has just been writing to Edith, and the thought of her
causes him uneasiness; he is longing to be with her again. Restlessly he
paces up and down the narrow chamber, unwilling to resume studies, by the
mastery of which he could alone hope to be with her again, until a knock
at the hall-door makes him pause and sit down; another knock (as if the
visitor did not care to be kept waiting). Mordant knew what was coming; he
remembered it all, and felt no surprise at seeing in his dream a friend
(now long since dead) enter the apartment, with the exclamation of "What,
Lindsay! all alone? I had expected to find you out, I was kept so long
knocking at your door. How are you, old fellow?" and Charles Vernon threw
himself into a chair. "We are all going to the play," continued he, "and a
supper afterward. You know Leclerque? he will be one of the party--will you
come?" and Vernon waited for an answer. The one addressed replied in the
affirmative, and Mordant saw (with a shudder) the same figure which had
lured him on in Pleasure to seek lost Happiness, now tempting the youth
before him. The two were so like each other in outward appearance, that he
wondered not that he too was deceived, and followed her with even more
eagerness than he had ever done her more retiring sister. And then with
that gay creature ever in mind, Mordant saw the young man led on from one
place of amusement to another--from supper and wine to dice and a
gambling-table--until ruin stared him in the face, and that mind, which had
once been pure and untarnished, was fast becoming defaced by a too close
connection with vice.

Mordant was wiser now, and he saw how flimsy and unreal this figure of
Pleasure appeared--how her gold was tinsel, and her laughter but the hollow
echo of a forced merriment--unlike his own once possessed Happines