'"Scoundrel in your teeth again!" he exclaimed, turning up the cuffs of his coat, threateningly, and striking his battered hat firmly on his head; "is this your company manners, you young cub?" he added, with a frightful imprecation. '"Who are you, and what do you want here?" I demanded, looking about for a stick. '"Dabchick is my name! Jo Dabchick, clown, Banger's Circus, Surreyside o' the river, and no mistake; and I have come here to see my own daughter, Laura Dorillion, as she calls herself, or must it be Mrs. Antony Dalton now--Lady Dalton perhaps that's to be, when your uncle hops his blessed twig?" '"Oh, father," said Laura, in a breathless voice, "why have you come, and how did you find me out?" '"I come because I want money; and, as for finding you out, that was easy enough; the Hastings theatre ain't at the bottom of the sea." "'And mother?" '"Is there in your bed--has had a drop too much, and so I have tucked her in there; and now what have you got for supper--tripe, sausages, bloaters, or summat tasty, I hope? Speak--you look as lively as a couple of glow-worms in the sunshine!" 'My soul sickened within me! And with these additions to our little household--a slatternly, odious mother, a beery, broken-down actor, whose line had once been genteel comedy, a clown in a circus latterly, but whose incessant dissipation had deprived him of all employment--life became a burden now, and my stupendous folly stood in letters of fire before me. 'Existence became unendurable, and neither Laura nor I dared to look forward to the dark and vague future we might be doomed to drag out in the world. 'Their arrival filled my wife with shame and anger, and I do believe with generous sorrow for me. My quarter's pittance was soon expended; _her_ salary could not maintain us all. My tutor soon discovered the whole situation, and laid it mercilessly bare before my uncle, Sir John Dalton, who from that hour cast me off, ignored my letters and my existence, and disinherited me by his will. 'I had no money, or means of getting any, after the best of my jewellery and wardrobe had departed. Laura's father and mother soon proved abusive and most obnoxious to me; they insulted me hourly, and eventually drove me from the squalid lodgings we shared together. Laura one night took their part; it required but that to fill up the measure of my disgust, and I found myself wandering in the streets with all I possessed in the world--the clothes that I wore. I rooted the love of her out of my heart; but it was long before I could efface her image, which often a fancied resemblance in another brought before me. 'There are some men of whom it is said that they will not acknowledge their false steps even to their own hearts; but I am not one of them, and must acknowledge, dear Goring, that in sackcloth and ashes I have repented of mine.