called themselves his father's friends; he found to his cost
that the son of a detected swindler has no friends, and more especially
if his own life have been tainted with suspicion or dishonour. Poor
Bruce was driven to the very verge of despair.

He applied for a situation in a bank, but he was informed that it could
not be granted him unless he could obtain a certificate of good
character from his college, which, of course, was out of the question.
He tried writing for the press, but his shallow intellectual resources
soon ran dry. The pittance he could thus earn did not remunerate him
for the toil and wasted health, and even this pittance was too often
cruelly held back. He made applications in answer to all sorts of
advertisements, but one after another the replies were unfavourable,
until his whole heart died within him. No intelligence could be
obtained of his father's hiding-place, and before a year had elapsed
since Sir Rollo's bankruptcy and felony had been made known, Lady Bruce
died at her son's lodgings, worn out with misery and shame.

This climax of the young man's misfortunes awoke at last the long
dormant sympathy in his favour. An effort was made by his few remaining
and unalienated friends to provide for him the means of emigration,
which seemed the only course likely to give him once more a fair start
in life. But to pay his passage, and provide him with the means of
settling in New Zealand required a considerable sum, and Bruce had to
suffer for weeks the agonies of hope deferred. And when he glanced over
his past life, he found nothing to help him. He could not look back
with any comfort; the past was haunted by the phantoms of regret. His
violent and wilful infancy, his proud, passionate boyhood, his wandering
and wicked youth, afforded him few green spots whereon the eye of
retrospect could rest with calm. As the wayworn traveller who on some
bright day sat down by the fringed bank of clear fountain or silver
lake, and while he leant to look into its waters, was suddenly dazzled
into madness by the flashing upwards upon him, from the unknown depths,
of some startling image; so Bruce, as he rested by the dusty wayside of
life, and gazed into the dark abysses of recollection, was startled and
horrified, with a more fearful nympholepsy, by the crowding images and
sullen glare of unforgotten and half-forgotten sins.

But in dwelling on his past life, Bruce bethought him that he might
sti