will eventually give, I hope, only to one who is pre-eminently noble and
good. Come with me to your room, my child. I am very sorry I permitted
you to stay up to-night."

But Laura was sleepless and deeply troubled; she had never seen a
laborer--much less one of her own acquaintances--in Haldane's condition
before; and to her young, innocent mind the event had almost the
character of a tragedy. Although conscious of entire blamelessness, she
supposed that she was more directly the cause of Haldane's behavior than
was true, and that he was carrying out his threat to destroy himself by
reckless dissipation. She did not know that he had been beguiled into
his miserable condition through bad habits of long standing, and that he
had fallen into the clutches of those who always infest public haunts,
and live by preying upon the fast, foolish, and unwary. Haldane, from
his character and associations, was liable to such an experience
whenever circumstances combined to make it possible. Young men with no
more principle than he possessed are never safe from disaster, and they
who trust them trust rather to the chances of their not meeting the
peculiar temptations and tests to which they would prove unequal. Laura
could not then know how little she had to do with the tremendous
downfall of her premature lover. The same conditions given, he would
probably have met with the same experience upon any occasion. After his
first glass of punch the small degree of discretion that he had learned
thus far in life began to desert him; and every man as he becomes
intoxicated is first a fool, and then the victim of every one who
chooses to take advantage of his voluntary helplessness and degradation.

But innocent Laura saw a romantic and tragic element in the painful
event, and she fell asleep with some vague womanly thoughts about saving
a fellow-creature by the sacrifice of herself. However, the morning