But while on this point repentance seemed genuine, it was not so with
regard to his conduct towards Miss Trevanion. His gypsy nurture, his
loose associates, his extravagant French romances, his theatrical anode
of looking upon love intrigues and stage plots, seemed all to rise
between his intelligence and the due sense of the fraud and treachery he
had practised. He seemed to feel more shame at the exposure than at the
guilt, more despair at the failure of success than gratitude at escape
from crime. In a word, the nature of a whole life was not to be
remodelled at once,--at least by an artificer so unskilled as I.

After one of these interviews I stole into the room where Austin sat
with Roland, and watching a seasonable moment when Roland, shaking off a
revery, opened his Bible and sat down to it, with each muscle in his
face set, as I had seen it before, into iron resolution, I beckoned my
father from the room.

Pisistratus.--"I have again seen my cousin. I cannot make the way I
wished. My dear father, you must see him."

Mr. Caxton.--"I? Yes, assuredly, if I can be of any service. But will
he listen to me?"

Pisistratus.--"I think so. A young man will often respect in his elder
what he will resent as a presumption in his contemporary."

Mr. Caxton.--"It may be so. [Then more thoughtfully] But you describe
this strange boy's mind as a wreck! In what part of the mouldering
timbers can I fix the grappling-hook? Here it seems that most of the
supports on which we can best rely, when we would save another, fail
us,--religion, honor, the associations of childhood, the bonds of home,