But his poor, widowed old mother! She would care. Worse than sorrow for a dead son would be the torture of anxiety on account of a missing son whose fate or condition was unknowable. He was her only child, her only support, her only hope. Could he desert her in her age and destitution, and leave her with a load of intense anxiety and horrible doubt added to her burden of sorrow and poverty? Could he, dare he, bring this last and bitterest anguish upon her? No! no! no! Hard and ignoble as life must henceforth be to him, he must bear it—bear it for fifty or sixty years to come, perhaps. What right had he, indeed, to seek the repose of death, even if it should be repose instead of eternal retribution? He, a sinner above all sinners! Even though he felt that all he had done and all he had suffered was the work of a forewritten fate, yet none the less did he feel that he was this sinner above all sinners, with no right to repose in death, no right to comfort in life. Yet he must live and work without hope or heart in life or labor. He must live and work, not to attain the honors he had dreamed of, longed for, aspired to, and must finally have attained but for this fatal first false step, which had precipitated him to perdition; not for these brilliant hopes that formed his “Paradise Lost,” and never to be “Regained”; not as an ardent student or teacher in the schools and colleges, among the books and companions that he loved, and in the atmosphere that was his higher life! Oh, no! He had forfeited all that. He was unworthy of such companionship. Should he dare to attempt to earn his living, and pay for his education, as a teacher of boys? Ah, no! He must live and work as a hard laborer in some dockyard or depot, carrying heavy burdens, unfit to associate with the honest workmen who had lived worthy lives; and he would deny himself everything but the barest necessities of existence to keep his poor old mother in the comforts of life so long as she should live. This hard labor and hard living should be the self-inflicted “penal servitude” which he felt that he deserved, and which he knew would have been the lightest sentence for his deed which the law could have imposed, and even lighter, as it did not include imprisonment. To devote all his hard earnings to his aged mother’s benefit, and to go to see her sometimes, to cheer and console her, should be his own only comfort in his self-imposed expiation. And he must begin this penal servitude in some city where he was not known, so that he might keep the secret of his fall from her. She must never know of his poverty, privations and hard labor. He would always contrive to appear before her, on his visits, as a gentleman—however unworthy the name—so long as she should live. Afterward, when she should have finished her long pilgrimage on earth, and passed away to join her beloved ones gone before, then——