y, "my idleness springs from very different
causes."

"And then these Brogtens and people, whom you are so often seen with;
which of them do you think understands you, or can teach you anything
worth knowing? and which of them do you think you will ever care to look
back to as acquaintances in after days?"

"Not one of them. I hate the whole set."

"And then, my dear Kennedy--for I speak to you out of real good-will--I
would say it with the utmost delicacy, but you must know that your name
has suffered from the company you frequent."

"Can I not see it to be so?" he answered moodily; "no need to tell me
that, when I read it in the faces of nearly every man I see. The men
have not yet forgiven me De Vayne's absence, though really and truly
that sin does not lie at my door. Except Julian and Lillyston there is
hardly a man I respect, who does not look at me with averted eyes. Of
course Grayson and the dons detest me to a man; but I don't care for
them."

"Then, you mysterious fellow, seeing all this so clearly, why do you
suffer it to be so?"

Kennedy only shook his head; already there had begun to creep over him a
feeling of despair; already it seemed to him as though the gate of
heaven were a lion-haunted portal guarded by a fiery sword.

For he had soon found that his intense resolutions to do right met with
formidable checks. There are two stern facts--facts which it does us
all good to remember--which generally lie in the path of repentance, and
look like crouching lions to the remorseful soul. First, the fact that
we become so entangled by habit and circumstance, so enslaved by
association and custom, that the very atmosphere around us seems to have
become impregnated with a poison which we cannot cease to breathe;
secondly, the fact that "_in the physical world there is no forgiveness
of sins_;" to abandon our evil courses is not to escape the punishment
of them, and although we may have relinquished them wholly in the
present, we cannot escape the consequences of the past. Remission of
sin is _not_ the remission of their results. The very monsters we
dread, and the dread of which terrifies us into the consideration of our
ways, glare upon us out of the future darkness, as large, as terrible,
as irresistible, whether we approach them on the road to ruin, or
whether we seem to fly from them through the hardly attained and narrow
wicket of genuine repentance.

Both these difficulties acted with thei