I was frantic and desperate as I tried to make my way through the thicket, and at last on arriving at the village, I took the midnight train and travelled to a town in the State of Maine. From this place I wrote to my creditors, confessing my financial difficulties, and begging of them not to seek me out, nor take any further interest in me, as I had resolved to begin my blighted life over again, in a strange land among strange people. I tried O, Elersley! God knows how hard, to earn honest bread, but I did not deserve success, and so God refused to bless my labor. I left Maine, and came here to New York, two years ago. I turned my hand to everything, but the bitter sting of misfortune was at the bottom of all. I tried my pen, recently, for my limbs seemed incompetent for any active service, but sitting here in this little narrow room, through the long night, trying to invent some gay little snatch of fiction out of the store of a mind so crushed and oppressed, was too bitter a mockery to last very long. My fair fashionable heroines looked at me in my dreams with eyes blood-shot and revengeful, saying, 'This is what you have brought me to.' For I suppose, Elersley, that girl never did a day's good since. Her fate has been constantly preying on my mind. I have spent a life of wretched expiation already in this world, God only knows what awaits me in the next. I have studiously avoided the sex I have outraged by this deed, feeling myself an outcast and a traitor in their presence. I have turned my back on the few haunts of pleasure that were open to me, for the sound of my own voice in gaiety, frightened and reproached me. As for _him_ Elersley, though I have not seen him, nor heard of him, since, yet I know he is revelling in the luxury of his ill-gotten wealth." The sick man stopped a moment, and let the tired lids droop languidly over the dark eyes, then opening them again, he looked full into Guy's pale face. When he resumed his voice was nervous and weak. "You have now the truthful story of my woe," he said, brokenly, "are you still willing to help me?" The question brought Elersley back from his wanderings. "Do you tell me truthfully that this is the villany of the boy we pampered so at school?" "That is the story of Vivian Standish's cowardly conduct," said Bencroft, in a tone of deep resentment.