Soon came a rumor, at first vague and undefined, and then voraciously seized upon and circulated by Paul Pry penny-a-liners, (who recked little, in their avidity for a paragraph, of broken-hearted mothers or despairing gray-haired fathers,) of a true heart that had been betrayed, of a disgraced household, of a fair brow that must henceforth walk the earth shame-branded. Then from his avenging pursuers the rash boy fled for refuge to him who had first turned his youthful footsteps aside from truth and honor. He was repulsed with scorn; not because he had wronged his own soul and hers whose star had forever set in night, but because he had not more skilfully and secretly woven the meshes for his victim.
Across the seas, amid the reckless debauchery of God-forgetting Paris, the miserable boy sought oblivion; welcoming with desperate eagerness the syren Pleasure, in every chameleon shape that could stifle conscience or drown torturing memory. Sometimes by a lucky throw of the dice he was enabled to shine as the Adonis of some ball, or theatre, or gay saloon: sometimes destitute as the humblest _chiffonier_, who suns himself in the public square, and solicits charity of the indifferent passer-by. In the rosy glow of morning, the bright stars paled while Harry sat at the enticing gaming table, till even those accustomed to breathe the polluted atmosphere of those gates of perdition, turned shuddering away, from the fiendish look of that youthful face.
Nature revenged herself at last. Wearisome days of sickness came, and he who was nurtured in luxury, was dependent upon the charity of grudging strangers.
Oh! what a broad, clear beam eternity throws upon the crooked by-paths of sin! how like swift visions pass the long forgotten prayer at the blessed mother's knee; the long-forgotten words of Holy Writ; the soothing vesper hymn, of holy time; the first cautious, retrograding step--the gradual searing of conscience, till the barrier between right and wrong is ruthlessly trampled under foot; the broken resolutions, the misspent years, the wasted energies; the sins against one's own soul, the sins against others; the powerless wish to pray, 'mid paroxysms of bodily pain; the clinging hold on life--the anxious glance at the physician--the thrilling question, "Doctor, is it life or death?"