"And then, my dear Kennedy--for I speak to you out of real good-will--I would say it with the utmost delicacy, but you must know that your name has suffered from the company you frequent." "Can I not see it to be so?" he answered moodily; "no need to tell me that, when I read it in the faces of nearly every man I see. The men have not yet forgiven me De Vayne's absence, though really and truly that sin does not lie at my door. Except Julian and Lillyston there is hardly a man I respect, who does not look at me with averted eyes. Of course Grayson and the dons detest me to a man; but I don't care for them." "Then, you mysterious fellow, seeing all this so clearly, why do you suffer it to be so?" Kennedy only shook his head; already there had begun to creep over him a feeling of despair; already it seemed to him as though the gate of heaven were a lion-haunted portal guarded by a fiery sword. For he had soon found that his intense resolutions to do right met with formidable checks. There are two stern facts--facts which it does us all good to remember--which generally lie in the path of repentance, and look like crouching lions to the remorseful soul. First, the fact that we become so entangled by habit and circumstance, so enslaved by association and custom, that the very atmosphere around us seems to have become impregnated with a poison which we cannot cease to breathe; secondly, the fact that "_in the physical world there is no forgiveness of sins_;" to abandon our evil courses is not to escape the punishment of them, and although we may have relinquished them wholly in the present, we cannot escape the consequences of the past. Remission of sin is _not_ the remission of their results. The very monsters we dread, and the dread of which terrifies us into the consideration of our ways, glare upon us out of the future darkness, as large, as terrible, as irresistible, whether we approach them on the road to ruin, or whether we seem to fly from them through the hardly attained and narrow wicket of genuine repentance. Both these difficulties acted with their full force on the mind of Kennedy. His error was its own punishment, and its heaviest punishment. The hours he had lost were lost so utterly, that he could never hope to recover them; the undesirable acquaintances he had formed were so far ripe as to render it no light task to abandon them; and above all, the fleck on his character, the connection of his name with the outrage on De Vayne, had injured his reputation in a manner which he never hoped, by future endeavours, to obviate or remove. For instance, there was at once an objection to his dropping the society of the set to which Bruce and Brogten had introduced him. He owed them money, which at present he could not pay; his undischarged "debts of honour" hung like a millstone round his neck. To pay these seemed a necessary preliminary even to the possibility of commencing a new career.