t one person
into his confidence, all might have been well. But Violet--could he
ever tell Violet of sins which her noble heart must render so
inconceivable as almost to make it impossible for her to sympathise with
one who committed them? And Eva; could he ever wound the tender
affection of his sweet sister, by revealing to her the disgrace of the
brother whom, from her childhood, she had idolised? He sometimes
thought that he would confess to Julian or Lillyston; but his courage
failed him when the time came, and he fed on his own heart in solitude,
avoiding the society of men.

The sore burden of a self-reproaching spirit wore him down. He had
fallen so often now, and swerved so often from the path of temperance,
rectitude, and honour, that he began to regard himself as a hopeless
reprobate--as one who had been weighed and found wanting--tested of God,
and deliberately set aside.

And so step by step the devil thrust him into desperation, and strove
thereby to clinch the hopelessness of his estate. With wild fierce
passion, Kennedy flung himself into sins he had never known before;
angrily he laid waste the beauty and glory of the vineyard whose hedge
had been broken down; a little entrance to the sanctuary had been opened
to evil thoughts, and they, when once admitted, soon flung back wider
and wider the golden gates, till the revelling band of worse
wickednesses rushed in and defiled the altar, and trampled on the virgin
floors, and defaced the cedarn walls with images of idolatry and
picturings of sin. Because he had sunk into the slough of despond, he
would be heedless of the mud that gathered on his garments. Was he not
ruined already? Could anything much worse befall him than had befallen
him already? No; he would sin on now and take his fill.

It was a short period of his life; but in no other period did he suffer
so much, or shake more fatally the foundations of all future happiness.
It was emphatically a sin against his own soul, and as such it affected
his very look. Those blue laughing eyes were clouded over, and the
bloom died away from his cheeks, and the ingenuous beauty from his
countenance, as the light of the Shechinah grew pale and dim in the
inmost sanctuary. Kennedy was not mastered by impulse, but driven by
despair.

Nor did he take any precaution to shield himself from punishment--the
punishment of outward circumstance and natural consequence--as his moral
abasement proceeded. H