Ascott yielded. He had been so long, so utterly forlorn. He sat down beside Elizabeth, and then, with eyes often averted, and with many breaks between, which she had to fill up as best as she could, he told her all his story, even to the sad secret of all, which had caused him to run away from home, and hide himself in the last place where they would have thought he was, the safe wilderness of London. There, carefully disguised, he had lived decently while his money lasted, and then, driven step by step to the brink of destitution, he had offered himself for employment in the lowest grade of his own profession, and been taken as assistant by the not over scrupulous chemist and druggist in that not too respectable neighborhood of Westminster, with a salary of twenty pounds a year. "And I actually live upon it!" added he, with a bitter smile. "I can't run into debt; for who would trust me? And I dress in rags almost, as you see. And I get my meals how and where I can; and I sleep under the shop counter. A pretty life for Mr. Ascott Leaf, isn't it now? What would my aunts say if they knew it?" "They would say that it was an honest life, and that they were not a bit ashamed of you." Ascott drew himself up a little, and his chest heaved visibly under the close buttoned, thread bare coat. "Well, at least, it is a life that makes nobody else miserable." Ay, that wonderful teacher, Adversity, "Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in its head," had left behind this jewel in the young man's heart. A disguised, beggared outcast, he had found out the value of an honest name; forsaken, unfriended, he had learned the preciousness of home and love; made a servant of, tyrannized over, and held in low esteem, he had been taught by hard experience the secret of true humility and charity--the esteeming of others better than himself. Not with all natures does misfortune so work, but it did with his. He had sinned; he had paid the cost of his sin in bitter suffering; but the result was cheaply bought, and he already began to feel that it was so. "Yes," said he, in answer to a question of Elizabeth's, "I really am, for some things, happier than I used to be. I feel more like what I was in the old days, when I was a little chap at Stowbury. Poor old Stowbury! I often think of the place in a way that's perfectly ridiculous. Still, if any thing happened to me, I should like my aunts to know it, and that I didn't forget them." "But, Sir," asked Elizabeth earnestly, "do you never mean to go near your aunts again?"