“I did not realize then, however, all that I had done. The operation entered into by Mr. Delafield prospered, and in two months I had, as he predicted, ten thousand dollars instead of five, in my possession. Besides, I had just married Ona, and for awhile life was a dream of delight and luxury. But there came a day when I awoke to an insight of the peril I had escaped by a mere chance of the die. The money which I had expected from my aunt’s will, turned out to be amongst certain funds that had been risked in speculation by some agent during her sickness, and irrecoverably lost. The expression of her good-will was all that ever came to me of the legacy upon which I had so confidently relied. “I was sitting with my young wife in the pretty parlor of our new home, when the letter came from my lawyer announcing this fact, and I never can make you understand what effect it had upon me. The very walls seemed to shrivel up into the dimensions of a prison’s cell; the face that only an hour before had possessed every conceivable charm for me, shone on my changed vision with the allurement, but also with the unreality of a will-o’-the-wisp. All that might have happened if the luck, instead of being in my favor, had turned against me, crushed like a thunderbolt upon my head, and I rose up and left the presence of my young wife, with the knowledge at my heart that I was no more nor less than a thief in the eyes of God, if not in that of my fellow-men; a base thief, who if he did not meet his fit punishment, was only saved from it by fortuitous circumstances and the ignorance of those he had been so near despoiling. “The bitterness of that hour never passed away. The streets in which I had been raised, the house which had been the scene of my temptation, Mr. Delafield’s face, and my own home, all became unendurable to me. I felt as if each man I met must know what I had done; and secret as the transaction had been, it was long before I could enter the bank without a tremor of apprehension lest I should hear from some quarter, that my services there would no longer be required. The only comfort I received was in the thought that Ona did not know at what a cost her hand had been obtained. I was still under the glamour of her languid smiles and countless graces, and was fain to believe that notwithstanding a certain unresponsiveness and coldness in her nature, her love would yet prove a compensation for the remorse that I secretly suffered.