Three years went by.  The elderly adventurer then fell in with a young, wealthy, and inexperienced man, who had loved the same woman, and whose honourable addresses had been declined for his sake; and he acquired over this youth an influence almost as strong as that which he had exercised over the young girl.  He found him grieving over his disappointment, and undertook to teach him how to forget it; became his master in the art of dissipation; helped to empty his pockets while he filled his own; and finally induced him to form a mercenary engagement to a cousin whom he did not love.  When the story opens, the young man has come to visit his bride-elect in her country home; and his Mephistopheles has followed him, under a transparent pretext, to secure a last chance of winning money from him at cards.  The presence of the latter is to be a secret, because he is too ill-famed a personage to be admitted into the lady’s house; so they have arrived on the eve of the appointed day, and put up at a village inn on the outskirts of the cousin’s estate.  There they have spent the night in play.  There also the luck has turned; and the usual winner has lost ten thousand pounds.  His friend insists on cancelling the debt.  He affects to scout the idea.  “The money shall, by some means or other, be paid.”

The discussion is renewed with the same result, as they loiter near the station, at which the younger will presently make a feint of arriving; and for the first time he asks the elder why, with such abilities as his, he has made no mark in life.  The latter replies that he found and lost his opportunity four years ago, in a woman, who, he feels more and more, would have quickened his energies to better ends.  He then, with tolerable frankness, relates his story.  The younger follows with his own.  But, for a reason which explains itself at the time, the connection between the two escapes them.

The woman herself next appears on the scene, and with her, the girl cousin.  They are friends of old; and the married one has emerged from her seclusion at the entreaty of the betrothed, to pass judgment on her intended husband.  The young girl is not satisfied with her own feeling towards him whom she has promised to marry; though she has no misgiving as to his sentiments towards her.  She is to bring him for inspection to the inn.  And the friend, entering its parlour alone, is confronted by her former lover, who has temporarily returned there.

A stormy dialogue ensues.  She denounces him as the destroyer, ever lying in wait for her soul.  He taunts her with the malignant hatred with which for years past from the height of her own prosperity she has been weighing down his.  She retorts in a powerful description of the love with which he once inspired her, of the living death in which she has been expiating her mistake.  And as he listens, the old feeling in him revives, and he kneels to her, imploring that she will break her bonds, and secure