it cost him his place, and the harder-hearted father himself thrust his
starving child into the cold street, into the drizzling rain, and
slammed the door upon her cries of agony. The footman slipped out after
her, and five shillings--a large sum for him--found its way from his
kind hand to hers. Now the common ending might have come; now
starvation, the slow, unwilling, recourse to more shame and deeper vice;
then the forced hilarity, the unreal smile, which in so many of these
poor creatures hides a canker at the heart; the gradual
degradation--lower still and lower--oblivion for a moment sought in the
bottle--a life of sin and death ended in a hospital. The will of
Providence turned the frolic of three voluptuaries to good account; the
prince gave his purse-full, Sheridan his one last guinea for her present
needs: the name of the good-hearted Plush was discovered, and he was
taken into Carlton House, where he soon became known as Roberts, the
prince's confidential servant: and Sheridan bestirred himself to rescue
for ever the poor lady, whose beauty still remained as a temptation. He
procured her a situation, where she studied for the stage, on which she
eventually appeared. 'All's well that ends well:' her secret was kept,
till one admirer came honourably forward. To him it was confided, and he
was noble enough to forgive the one false step of youth. She was well
married, and the boy for whom she had suffered so much fell at
Trafalgar, a lieutenant in the navy.

To better men such an adventure would have been a solemn warning; such a
tale, told by the ruined one herself, a sermon, every word of which
would have clung to their memories. What effect, if any, it may have had
on Blackstock and his companions must have been very fleeting.

It is not so very long since the Seven Dials and St. Giles' were haunts
of wickedness and dens of thieves, into which the police scarcely dared