But, surely, the father was grievously in error; his parental fear, alone, had certainly drawn the picture of his son's reduced and miserable condition. I had seen nothing of this. I had observed that he was shy, incommunicative--seeking to avoid me, as, according to their showing, he had striven to avoid his parents. So far our experience had been the same. But I had totally failed to perceive the marks of suffering or of sin which the vivid feelings of the father on this subject had insisted were so apparent. I had seen in Edgerton only the false friend, the traitor, stealing like a serpent to my bower, to beguile from my side the only object which made it dear to me. I could see in him only the exulting seducer, confident in his ability, artful in his endeavors, winning in his accomplishments, and striving with practised industry of libertinism, in the prosecution of his cruel schemes. I could see the grace of his bearing, the ease of his manner, the symmetry of his person, the neatness of his costume, the superiority of his dancing, the insinuation of his address. I could see these only! That he looked miserable--that he was thin to meagreness, I had not seen. Yet, even were it so, what could this prove, as the father had conclusively shown, but guilt. Poverty could not trouble him--he had never been an unrequited lover. He had gone along the stream of society, indifferent to the lures of beauty, and with a bark that had always appeared studiously to keep aloof from the shores or shoals of matrimony. If he was miserable, his misery could only come from misconduct, not from misfortune. It was a misery engendered by guilt, and what was that guilt? I KNEW that he did not drink; and was not his course in regard to Kingsley, as narrated by that person on the night when we went to the gaming-house together--was not that sufficient to show that he was no gamester, unless he happened to be one of the most bare faced of all canting hypocrites, which I could not believe him to be. What remained, but that my calculations were right? It was guilt that was sinking him, body and soul, so that his eye no longer dared to look upward--so that his ear shrunk from the sounds of those voices which, even in the language of kindness, were still speaking to him in the severest language of rebuke. And whom did that guilt concern more completely than myself? Say that the father was to lose his son, his only son--what was my loss, what was my shame! and upon whom should the curse most fully and finally fall, if not upon the wrong-doer, though it so happened that the ruin of the guilty brought with it overthrow to the innocent scarcely less complete! The extent of that guilt of Edgerton?