Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/68

 affairs with levity--MONEY is CHARACTER! Stop. I have bared a father's fault to a son. It was necessary--or even in his grave those faults might have revived in you. Now, I add this, if Charles Haughton--like you, handsome, high-spirited, favoured by men, spoiled by women--if Charles Haughton, on entering life, could have seen, in the mirror I have held up to you, the consequences of pledging the morrow to pay for to-day, Charles Haughton would have been shocked as you are, cured as you will be. Humbled by your own first error, be lenient to all his. Take up his life where I first knew it: when his heart was loyal, his lips truthful. Raze out the interval; imagine that he gave birth to you in order to replace the leaves of existence we thus blot out and tear away. In every error avoided say, 'Thus the father warns the son;' in every honourable action, or hard self-sacrifice, say, 'Thus the son pays a father's debt.'"

Lionel, clasping his hands together, raised his eyes streaming with tears, as if uttering inly a vow to Heaven. The Colonel bowed his soldier-crest with religious reverence, and glided from the room noiselessly.

CHAPTER VIII.

BEING BUT ONE OF THE CONSIDERATE PAUSES IN A LONG JOURNEY, CHARITABLY AFFORDED TO THE READER.

Colonel Morley found Mr. Poole at home, just returned from his office; he stayed with that gentleman nearly an hour, and then went straight to Darrell. As the time appointed to meet the French acquaintance, who depended on his hospitalities for a dinner, was now nearly arrived, Alban's conference with his English friend was necessarily brief and hurried, though long enough to confirm one fact in Mr. Poole's statement, which had been unknown to the Colonel before that day, and the admission of which inflicted on Guy Darrell a pang as sharp as ever wrenched confession from the lips of a prisoner in the cells of the Inquisition. On returning from Greenwich, and depositing his Frenchman in some melancholy theatre, time enough for that resentful foreigner to witness theft and murder committed upon an injured countryman's vaudeville, Alban hastened again to Carlton Gardens. He found Darrell