was too full of other things to allow him to
remember this. As he walked along the Embankment, his thoughts were
very heavy. How would things go with him?--What would be the end of
it? Ruin;--yes, but there were worse things than ruin. And a short time
since he had been so fortunate;--had made himself so safe! As he looked
back at it, he could hardly say how it had come to pass that he had
been driven out of the track that he had laid down for himself. He had
known that ruin would come, and had made himself so comfortably safe,
so brilliantly safe, in spite of ruin. But insane ambition had driven
him away from his anchorage. He told himself over and over again that
the fault had been not in circumstances,--not in that which men call
Fortune,--but in his own incapacity to bear his position. He saw it
now. He felt it now. If he could only begin again, how different
would his conduct be!

But of what avail were such regrets as these? He must take things as
they were now, and see that, in dealing with them, he allowed himself
to be carried away neither by pride nor cowardice. And if the worst
should come to the worst, then let him face it like a man! There was a
certain manliness about him which showed itself perhaps as strongly in
his own self-condemnation as in any other part of his conduct at this
time. Judging of himself, as though he were standing outside himself
and looking on to another man's work, he pointed out to himself his
own shortcomings. If it were all to be done again he thought that he
could avoid this bump against the rocks on one side, and that terribly
shattering blow on the other. There was much that he was ashamed of,--
many a little act which recurred to him vividly in this solitary hour
as a thing to be repented of with inner sackcloth and ashes. But never
once, not for a moment, did it occur to him that he should repent of
the fraud in which his whole life had been passed. No idea ever
crossed his mind of what might have been the result had he lived the
life of an honest man. Though he was inquiring into himself as closely
as he could, he never even told himself that he had been dishonest.
Fraud and dishonesty had been the very principle of his life, and had
so become a part of his blood and bones that even in this extremity of
his misery he made no question within himself as to his right judgment
in regard to them. Not to cheat, not to be a scoundrel, not to live
more luxuriously than others by ch