This climax of the young man's misfortunes awoke at last the long dormant sympathy in his favour. An effort was made by his few remaining and unalienated friends to provide for him the means of emigration, which seemed the only course likely to give him once more a fair start in life. But to pay his passage, and provide him with the means of settling in New Zealand required a considerable sum, and Bruce had to suffer for weeks the agonies of hope deferred. And when he glanced over his past life, he found nothing to help him. He could not look back with any comfort; the past was haunted by the phantoms of regret. His violent and wilful infancy, his proud, passionate boyhood, his wandering and wicked youth, afforded him few green spots whereon the eye of retrospect could rest with calm. As the wayworn traveller who on some bright day sat down by the fringed bank of clear fountain or silver lake, and while he leant to look into its waters, was suddenly dazzled into madness by the flashing upwards upon him, from the unknown depths, of some startling image; so Bruce, as he rested by the dusty wayside of life, and gazed into the dark abysses of recollection, was startled and horrified, with a more fearful nympholepsy, by the crowding images and sullen glare of unforgotten and half-forgotten sins. But in dwelling on his past life, Bruce bethought him that he might still find friends at school; and not long after his mother's funeral, he determined to call on his old masters, and get such pecuniary aid as he could from them and his schoolboy friends. To come to such a resolution was the very bitterness of humiliation; but Bruce was now all eagerness to escape from England, and recommence a new life in other lands. He took a third class ticket to Harton, and when he arrived there, was so overcome with shame that he well-nigh determined to return by the next train, and leave the town unvisited, at whatever cost; but on inquiry he found that the next train would not start for some hours, and meanwhile he fully expected to be seen and recognised by those whom he had known before. And yet it was not easy, in that stooping figure, with the pale cheek and dimmed eye, to recognise the bright and audacious Vyvyan Bruce, who had been captain of Harton barely three years before. Poverty, ruin, disappointment, confinement, guilt, and sorrow had done their work with marvellous quickness.