The fortune of Miss Farney was not exactly of the kind that suited Mr Dempster’s views. It was only payable after the death of her father. Mr Dempster, therefore, saw it to be necessary to take expedients for obtaining the use of it by anticipation. He commenced a large concern in some mercantile line, obtaining money in advance from the old gentleman, in order to set the establishment on foot. He also procured his signature to innumerable bills, to enable him to carry it on. The business, in reality, was a mere mask for obtaining the means of supporting his own depraved tastes and appetites. There was hardly any kind of extravagance, any kind of vice, which he did not indulge in at the expense of old Farney. The result was what might be expected from such premises. Exactly a twelvemonth after the marriage, Dempster stopped payment, and absconded without so much as even taking leave of his wife. His folly and profligacy together had already absorbed the whole fortune with which Mr Farney had retired from business, besides a good deal more for which the unfortunate old man was security. He was in consequence totally ruined, left destitute in old age, without the least resource; while the young elegant female, who a short year before was the admiration and envy of glittering circles, had just become a mother, upon the bed which only waited for her convalescence to be sold for behoof of her husband’s creditors. Farney found refuge—and considered himself most fortunate in finding it—in a beneficiary institution for decayed citizens, of which he had himself, in better days, been one of the managers, but which he did not live long to enjoy. His wife, about the same time, died of one of those numberless and varied diseases which can only be traced to what is called a broken heart. The daughter—the unhappy, and, in a great measure, guiltless victim of her wretched ambition—had no eventual resource, for the support of herself and her infant, but to open a small school, in which she taught female children the elements of reading, writing, and sewing. The striking infelicity of her fate, joined to her own well-known taste and industrious habits, in time obtained for her considerable patronage in this humble occupation; and she would eventually have been restored to something like comfort, but for the unhallowed wretch whose fate had become identified with her own. Where this fellow went, or how he subsisted, for the three years during which he was absent, no one ever knew. He was heard to talk of the smugglers in the Isle of Man, but it can only be surmised that he joined that respectable corps. One day, as Mrs Dempster sat in the midst of her little flock of pupils, the door was opened, and in crawled her prodigal husband, emaciated, travel-worn, and beggar-like, with a large black spot upon one of his cheeks, the result of some unimaginably low and scoundrelly brawl. The moment she recognised him,