Both Beauchamp and Hayward had done an important thing that night. The latter had stripped himself for a friend's benefit of the treasured resource of after-life. Never rich, he had left himself but a scanty pittance which was not likely to be increased by any means but his own personal exertions. From that moment, he felt that his course of life must be changed, that his views, his feelings, his habits, must undergo a severe scrutiny, and be subjected to a hard discipline; that the careless ease, the light-hearted indifference to the morrow was at an end; that the small cares he had never yet known, the looking to shillings and to pence, and all the sordid minutia; of difficult economy were to be his companions for life, as inseparable from his footsteps as his shadow. Honest poverty may be a very fine thing in contemplation, but let its admirers understand that it is a difficult thing in practice; for honesty and poverty are like Adam and the devil in the garden, ill-suited tenants of one house, the latter of whom is always laying out snares to reduce his companion to his own level. If such be the case where the circumstances of birth have made the evils of poverty habitual, and given its temptations no factitious advantages, how much more is it so, when a knowledge of, a taste for, and a long education in ease and comfort, have both engendered a habit of expense, and rendered the restraints of poverty privations. It is then that honesty has to struggle with a host of foes, and too often a murder and suicide are committed: honesty killing itself after an attempt to get rid of its comrade. But Ned Hayward was a very honest man, and his first thought was how to bear his poverty rightly. He gave not one thought to the money he had just given away--for so he believed it to be--he would have performed the same act over and over again a dozen times if he had had the means and the motives to do so; and would each time have done it willingly; but that did not prevent his feeling the painful situation in which he had left himself; and he contemplated with deep thought and stern resolution all that was to issue from the deed he had done.