Days passed. Raymond Withers now too surely, terribly felt that his love for Rosalia was no longer pure brotherly affection. It was an intense and an absorbing passion. He began to struggle against its nearly overwhelming power—he began to avoid the charming girl. _Now_ could Hagar have trusted him; could she have believed in the _power_ of redeeming qualities that really existed in his heart; the solid substratum of good that lay beneath all this superficial alluvion of wilfulness and effeminacy; her faith might yet have saved him; saved herself from much anguish. As it was, Raymond Withers struggled on alone against the advancing power of his great temptation. He might have struggled longer, he might have struggled successfully, but that the very means he took accelerated the crisis, the catastrophe. He began to avoid Rosalia; declined her music; evaded her questions; repulsed her gentle attentions, until the guileless girl, utterly unable to comprehend her position, grew wretched, more wretched every day, in the thought that her _last friend, her only present friend_, as in her heart she began to style Raymond, had fallen from her; and by the fatality that makes us set a higher value upon a possession that is passing away, Rosalia began to prize his affection exceedingly—to desire its continuance more than all things—to lament its seeming loss passionately—to strive to win it back. “The clouds came on slow—slower;” the clouds whose vapors had been collected in, and evolved from their own bosoms, and raised to gather black and heavy in their sky, to break in thunder on their heads! Three circumstances combined to bring on the catastrophe of this household wreck, three circumstances, reader, that I wish you to notice, as I desire particularly to call attention here, and now, to the great importance of the formation of character in childhood and youth, and to the awful truth that the blackest treachery, the deepest guilt, the direst misery, the utmost perdition of men and women may sometimes be traced to the smallest, seemingly the most harmless mistakes in the education of boys and girls. Perhaps I have already been tedious upon this subject; perhaps I have dealt “in vain repetitions;” yet, in tracing the rise and progress of a guilty passion, can I be too emphatic in forcing the causes that produced this upon attention? These causes, then, I said there were three that conspired to bring down this impending thunderbolt.