It was too late for Mr Primrose to return to India; and the patronage or interest which once had favoured him now existed for him no longer. He had not been brought up to any profession whereby he might gain a livelihood in England, and he had been accustomed to a style of living which rendered daily bread a more expensive article to him than to those of humbler prospects. A very distressing and heart-rending scene may be drawn of human suffering from the lowest and most abject of the children of penury and destitution. But we have our doubts whether the bitterest and keenest sense of suffering is really in that class. The poor gentleman suffers mentally, and while the beggar who lives on casual charity has an occasional luxury in a full meal, he, whose poverty must be hidden but cannot be unknown, is labouring under an unremitting and incessant pressure; and it is this that wastes away the body to a mere shadow and bows down the spirit to the earth. They are cruel and unfeeling indeed, who mock such misery as this. We envy not the talent which can draw mirth from a source so painful. CHAPTER X. Another morning dawned, and with its opening light there came to the father of Penelope a feeling of his comparatively destitute situation. His heart swelled as he thought of it, and he had some difficulty to preserve composure enough to meet his child. There was however one drop of consolation in the cup of his affliction, for it was not by his own fault or folly that his present loss was occasioned. But even this consolation afflicted him, for it brought to his recollection his past folly, and reminded him of the patient endurance with which the mother of his Penelope had borne up, as long as possible, against her sufferings. He recollected how gradually and slowly she sunk, and how to the very last moment of life her looks were to him all tenderness and forgiveness. And he thought that he could also discern in his child those same moral features which had been the grace and glory of her departed mother. Commanding his feelings as well as he could, he commenced the talk concerning the calamity of the preceding day. His heart was touched by the cheerful manner in which Penelope referred to the proposal of the Countess of Smatterton, and he smiled through his tears to hear how sanguinely the poor girl talked of the certainty of high success. But as yet all was in uncertainty.