you feel yourself to be.  At college I had an attachment to a lovely girl of seventeen; she was very much below my own station in life, and I never contemplated marrying her; but I induced her to leave her father’s house.  I did not mean to forsake her when I left college, and I quieted all scruples of conscience by promising myself that I would always take care of poor Lucy.  But on my return from a vacation spent in travelling, I found that Lucy was gone—­gone away with a gentleman, her neighbours said.  I was a good deal distressed, but I tried to persuade myself that no harm would come to her.  Soon afterwards I had an illness which left my health delicate, and made all dissipation distasteful to me.  Life seemed very wearisome and empty, and I looked with envy on every one who had some great and absorbing object—­even on my cousin who was preparing to go out as a missionary, and whom I had been used to think a dismal, tedious person, because he was constantly urging religious subjects upon me.  We were living in London then; it was three years since I had lost sight of Lucy; and one summer evening, about nine o’clock, as I was walking along Gower Street, I saw a knot of people on the causeway before me.  As I came up to them, I heard one woman say, “I tell you, she is dead.”  This awakened my interest, and I pushed my way within the circle.  The body of a woman, dressed in fine clothes, was lying against a door-step.  Her head was bent on one side, and the long curls had fallen over her cheek.  A tremor seized me when I saw the hair:  it was light chestnut—­the colour of Lucy’s.  I knelt down and turned aside the hair; it was Lucy—­dead—­with paint on her cheeks.  I found out afterwards that she had taken poison—­that she was in the power of a wicked woman—­that the very clothes on her back were not her own.  It was then that my past life burst upon me in all its hideousness.  I wished I had never been born.  I couldn’t look into the future.  Lucy’s dead painted face would follow me there, as it did when I looked back into the past—­as it did when I sat down to table with my friends, when I lay down in my bed, and when I rose up.  There was only one thing that could make life tolerable to me; that was, to spend all the rest of it in trying to save others from the ruin I had brought on one.  But how was that possible for me?  I had no comfort, no strength, no wisdom in my own soul; how could I give them to others?  My mind was dark, rebellious, at war with itself and with God.’

Mr. Tryan had been looking away from Janet.  His face was towards the fire, and he was absorbed in the images his memory was recalling.  But now he turned his eyes on her, and they met hers, fixed on him with the look of rapt expectation, with which one clinging to a slippery summit of a rock, while the waves are rising higher and higher, watches the boat that has put from shore to his rescue.