The poor little lady! First sold by a needy parent to an old man, and then betrayed by her own uncalculating affections to a young one, whose nature had the torpor without the venerableness of age! Her heart, full of all loving possibilities, had steered by false lights and been wrecked. Brief had been its poor, shattered dream of household joys and domestic amenities! It was the old, old story of the cheat and the dupe; of credulous innocence overmatched by heartless selfishness and fraud. The young man “of genteel appearance and address” who last week, as the newspapers tell us, got a supply of dry-goods from Messrs. Raby & Co., under false pretences, has been arrested, and will be duly punished. But the scoundrel who tricks a confiding woman out of her freedom and her happiness under the false pretences of a disinterested affection and the desire of a loving home,—the swindler who, with the motives of a devil of low degree, affects the fervor and the dispositions of a loyal heart,—for such an impostor the law has no lash, no prison. To play the blackleg and the sharper in a matter of the affections is not penal. Success consecrates the crime; and the victim, when her eyes are at length opened to the extent of the deception and the misery, must continue to submit to a yoke at once hateful and demoralizing; she must submit, unless she is willing to brave the ban of society and the persecutions of the law. Ralph Charlton, when he gave his wife Berwick’s letter the night before, had supposed she would sit down to pen an answer as soon as she was alone. And so the next morning, after visiting his office in Fulton Street, he retraced his steps, and re-entered his house soon after Toussaint had left, and just as Mrs. Charlton had put her signature to the last page of the manuscript, and, bowing her forehead on her palms, was giving vent to sobs of bitter emotion. Charlton was that prodigy in nature,—a young man in whom an avarice that would have been remarkable in a senile miser had put in subjection all the other passions. Well formed and not ungraceful, his countenance was at first rather prepossessing and propitiatory. It needed a keener eye than that of the ordinary physiognomist to penetrate to the inner nature. It was only when certain expressions flitted over the features that they betrayed him. You must study that countenance and take it at unawares before you could divine what it meant. Age had not yet hardened it in the mould of the predominant bias of the character. Well born and bred, he ought to have been a gentleman, but it is difficult for a man to be that and a miser at the same time. There was little in his style of dress that distinguished him from the mob of young business-men, except that a critical eye would detect that his clothes were well preserved. Few of his old coats were made to do service on the backs of the poor.