It might have satisfied one's ideas of justice if I could have told how Collis McSheen reaped in prison the reward of his long hidden crimes, and the adventurer, Pushkin, unmasked and degraded, was driven out from among the wealthy, whom he so sedulously cultivated; but this would not have been true to the facts. Collis McSheen moved into the great house which he had bought with his ill-gained wealth to gratify his daughter's ambition, and lived for many years, to outward seeming, a more or less respectable man; gave reasonably where he thought it would pay, from the money of which he had robbed others, and doubtless endeavored to forget his past, as he endeavored to make others forget it; but that past was linked to him by bands which no effort could ever break. And though he secured the adulation of those whom he could buy with his gaudy entertainments, he could never secure the recognition of any worthy man. In his desperate hope to become respectable he broke with many of his old friends and with all whom he could escape from, but he could not escape from one, however he strove to break with him: himself. Chained to him by a bond he could not break was the putrescent body of his reeking past. It is the curse of men like him that those he longs to make his friends are the element who will have none of him. Thus, like Sisyphus, he ever strives to roll the stone to the hill-top, and, like Tantalus, he ever strives to reach the water flowing below his lips. Though he had escaped the legal punishment of his crimes, his punishment was that he lived in constant dread of the detection which appeared ever to dog his footsteps. The last measure in the bitter cup which he had filled with his own hand came from his daughter, who now called herself Countess Pushkin. Finding that, notwithstanding her so-called title and large establishment, she was excluded from that set to which she had been tolerantly admitted while she had youth and gayety and the spirits of a schoolgirl, not to mention the blindness of that age to things which experience sees clearly enough, she conceived the idea that it was her father's presence in her home which closed to her the doors of those houses where she aspired to be intimate. The idea, though it had long had a lodgment in her mind, had been fostered by Pushkin. Having to make her choice between her father and her social aspirations, she decided promptly. The scene which occurred was one which neither Collis McSheen nor his daughter could ever forget. In the sequel McSheen moved out and took quarters in a hotel, where he gradually sank into the hopelessness of a lonely misanthrope, shorn of his power, feared only by those he despised, detested by those he admired, and haunted by the fear of those he hated.