destitution and want. She hastened to dress herself and seek an
audience with her protector; and the latter found with admiration and
pleasure that he had anticipated her own instantaneous and involuntary
design in the settlement made upon Darvil. He then communicated to
Alice the compact he had already formed with her father, and she wept
and kissed his hand when she heard, and secretly resolved that she would
work hard to be enabled to increase the sum allowed. Oh, if her labours
could serve to retrieve a parent from the necessity of darker resources
for support! Alas! when crime has become a custom, it is like gaming or
drinking--the excitement is wanting; and had Luke Darvil been suddenly
made inheritor of the wealth of a Rothschild, he would either still have
been a villain in one way or the other; or /ennui/ would have awakened
conscience, and he would have died of the change of habit.

Our banker always seemed more struck by Alice's moral feelings than even
by her physical beauty. Her love for her child, for instance, impressed
him powerfully, and he always gazed upon her with softer eyes when he
saw her caressing or nursing the little fatherless creature, whose
health was now delicate and precarious. It is difficult to say whether
he was absolutely in love with Alice; the phrase is too strong, perhaps,
to be applied to a man past fifty, who had gone through emotions and
trials enough to wear away freshness from his heart. His feelings
altogether for Alice, the designs he entertained towards her, were of a
very complicated nature; and it will be long, perhaps, before the reader
can thoroughly comprehend them. He conducted Alice home that day; but
he said little by the way, perhaps because his female relation, for
appearance' sake, accompanied them also. He, however, briefly cautioned
Alice on no account to communicate to any one that it was her father who
had been her visitor; and she still shuddered too much at the
reminiscence to appear likely to converse on it. The banker also judged