'He seemed very weak, except now and then when he was seized with
convulsions, and then he would writhe and throw himself about, and it
was more than I could do to keep him on his bed--I do not think it
possible for him to survive till morning.'

'Didn't he say anything, father?'

'It was a long time before he said anything, but after I had succeeded
in warming some liquid, which I found in an old broken cup, over the
decayed fire, I gave him a little of it, and in time he became much
calmer. Between his paroxysms of pain, I induced him to give some
account of himself, and the circumstances that brought him to his
present situation, and what think you was the prime moving cause of all
this wretchedness?'

'I suspect he was very poor,' said Effie.

'Something worse than that I should think,' added her brother, 'perhaps
he was a gamester.'

'Or a drunkard,' suggested Effie.

'Or both,' responded the mother, or perhaps he commenced by being merely
a time-waster, and money-waster, and finally was reduced to what persons
of that stamp are very apt to consider the necessity of committing
crime, by way of support.

Mr Maurice shook his head. 'It was neither poverty, nor play, nor
drunkenness, nor indolence, nor extravagance, that made that old man
wretched, and yet he was the most wretched being I ever saw.'