So Pen went back to Fair-Oaks. True, he had retrieved his failure, had won his honours, but he came back to his home a very different fellow from the bright-faced youth who had gone out into college life some years before. He no longer laughed, sang, or rollicked about the house as of old; he had tasted of the fruit of the awful Tree of Life which from the beginning had tempted all mankind, and which had changed Arthur Pendennis the light-hearted boy into a man. Young, he is, of course, and still awaiting the development which life's deeper experiences are to bring, but nevertheless he is not again to taste the joy, the zest, or the enthusiasm which come to careless boyhood. Arthur Pendennis is now a competitor among the ranks of men striving after life's prizes, and this narrative of his boyhood ends. CAROLINE [Illustration: Miss CAROLINE AND BECKY.] Since the time of Cinderella the First there have been many similar instances in real life of the persecution of youth by family injustice and cruelty, and no case more strikingly similar than that of Miss Caroline Brandenburg Gann, whose youthful career was one of monotonous hardship and injustice until the arrival of her fairy prince. The story is a short one to relate, but to live through the days and months of sixteen unhappy years seemed an eternal process to the young heart beating high with hopes which must constantly be stifled, and give place to bitter disappointment. But to go back for a moment to the time when Louis XVIII. was restored a second time to the throne of his father, and all the English who had money or leisure rushed over to the Continent. At that time there lived in a certain boarding-house at Brussels a lady who was called Mrs. Crabb; and her daughter, a genteel young widow, who bore the name of Mrs. Wellesley McCarty. Previous to this Mrs. McCarty, who was then Miss Crabb, had run off one day with a young Ensign, who possessed not a shilling, and who speedily died, leaving his widow without property, but with a remarkably fine pair of twins, named Rosalind Clancy and Isabella Finigan Wellesley McCarty.