desire such success he was incited by a secret one more powerful than
all the others combined.

Before going abroad, when but a clerk, he had been the favored suitor
of a beautiful and accomplished girl. Indeed the understanding between
them almost amounted to an engagement, and he revelled in a
passionate, romantic attachment at an age when the blood is hot, the
heart enthusiastic, and when not a particle of worldly cynicism and
adverse experience had taught him to moderate his rose-hued
anticipations. She seemed the embodiment of goodness, as well as
beauty and grace, for did she not repress his tendencies to be a
little fast? Did she not, with more than sisterly solicitude, counsel
him to shun certain florid youth whose premature blossoming indicated
that they might early run to seed? and did he not, in consequence, cut
Guy Bonner, the jolliest fellow he had ever known? Indeed, more than
all, had she not ventured to talk religion to him, so that for a time
he had regarded himself as in a very "hopeful frame of mind," and had
been inclined to take a mission-class in the same school with herself?
How lovely and angelic she had once appeared, stooping in elegant
costume from her social height to the little ragamuffins of the street
that sat gaping around her! As he gazed adoringly, while waiting to be
her resort home, his young heart had swelled with the impulse to be
good and noble also.

But one day she caused him to drop out of his roseate clouds. With
much sweetness and resignation, and with appropriate sighs, she said
that "it was her painful duty to tell him that their intimacy must
cease--that she had received an offer from Mr. Grobb, and that her
parents, and indeed all her friends, had urged her to accept him. She
had been led to feel that they with their riper experience and