Fanny lingered for a moment on the clammy pavement, but the deserted appearance of the streets speedily decided her, and she turned into the house and entered. The young man was sitting at one of the tables over which he was leaning, with his head leaning on his arms, and his countenance concealed: but no one else was in the room. A glass stood on the table. The man did not move when she entered, though she knew he could not be asleep, having only entered the house a moment before. ‘What a disagreeable night,’ Fanny ventured to observe, in the hope of attracting the young man’s attention. At the sound of her voice he started from his seat as if he had received a shock from a galvanic battery, and gazed with mingled wildness and earnestness at her. Fanny started also, and staggering backwards, sank upon a bench, and covered her face with her hands, for she had recognized Robert Jervis, her affianced lover, in the days of her virtuous happiness. Jervis was pale, and the unexpected meeting with one whom he had once loved so ardently had given to his countenance an expression of wildness and extreme agitation. ‘Has Fanny sunk so low as this? and so soon, too,’ said he, in a low voice, rendered hoarse by the agitation of his feelings. ‘Has she who ran away from her home become in so short a time a midnight frequenter of overcharged, and the common associate of the vicious portion of a class, the reputable members of which she once looked down upon with disdain?’ ‘Spare me, Robert,’ said Fanny, in a faint and broken voice, and without removing her hands from her countenance, ‘You know not what I have suffered—what I am suffering now.’ ‘I can easily believe that,’ returned Robert, surveying her with a look of mournful interest. ‘You have made me suffer, too—more deeply than I can find words to express; but I will not reproach you. While you have a heart to feel, if vice does not harden it to the core, you will find reproaches there which I cannot spare you.’ ‘I do,’ exclaimed Fanny, sobs choking her voice, and the pearly tears trickling down her hands. ‘You cannot reproach me more severely than my own heart does at this moment. If you knew all that I have endured and am enduring you would pity me.’ ‘Pity you!’ said Robert, who had become perfectly sober the moment he recognized the lost girl upon whom he was now gazing. ‘I have never ceased to pity you since the moment of my return to reason after that hour of madness that ruined both myself and you.’ ‘It was all my fault,’ sobbed Fanny, weeping as if her heart would break. ‘It matters little now, whether the fault was wholly yours or partly mine,’ said Robert, taking a hasty turn up and down the room. ‘It was more the fault of that villain Blodget: may heaven’s avenging lightnings scathe and blast him! May his own happiness and peace of mind be wrecked as ours have been!’