During his University career, at a very early age, Williamson had been attracted by the wild beauty of a woman who was the daughter of an adventurer--a man without principle--seeking in a son-in-law an annuity for himself, as well as a husband for his child. Williamson related by what mean and mercenary arts this man of the world had lured him on, and how the daughter had shared with her father in the shameful plot. A long, long story of love, and doubt, and fear, and unholy passion;--of mad, blind love, and desperate resolves; of a clandestine marriage, and exposure; of a widowed mother’s death; of a son’s sorrow embittered by his wife’s ingratitude, and a father-in-law’s impecunious and drunken habits. A long, long story of woe and violence; of a brave man’s struggle against the miseries of a worse than unloving wife, and a wretched home, in the midst of comparative wealth. Soon there appeared on the scene an infant with bright eyes, and a young doating father seeking comfort in its innocent loving ways, in its happy smile, and its first words. But this gleam of sunshine quickly disappeared, and then there came clouds again, darker and darker; and, finally, there stood forth in the immoral darkness a husband’s shame, a wife’s infidelity, a father’s miserable death from drink. Paul shuddered as he traced out the dreary story with the writer’s special notes and comments, intended to apply to Paul’s own position and act as awful warnings. Then at length the husband was alone. The wife had fled with a _cher ami_ of former days. Her child disappeared, too. She knew that the infant would have been a source of consolation to the forlorn and broken man; hence her fiendish vow that he should see it no more. The wrongs which she had heaped upon him induced all this fierce hatred and malice; and, finally, Williamson was alone in the world with his sorrows. Years passed away, and he heard a strange story of the death of his wife in connection with a travelling theatre or circus. The name of a celebrated comedian, who had by misconduct been reduced to the booth and the fair, was mixed up with the event in some way; but Williamson could never clear the story up satisfactorily, and all his efforts to obtain tidings of his child proved ineffectual. How he had lived since those terrible days of his early life his friends knew; that there was a dark shadow upon his history they knew also; but of the misery and despair, the blighted career, the hopes destroyed, the opportunities misapplied, the broken-down ambition, the aching heart, they knew nothing.