The fact was that, guilty or not guilty, Hook had been both incompetent and inconsiderate.  Doubtless he congratulated himself highly on receiving, at the age of twenty-five, an appointment worth L2,000 a year in the paradise of the world; but how short-sighted his satisfaction, since this very appointment left him some ten years later a pauper to begin life anew with an indelible stain on his character.  It was absurd to give so young a man such a post; but it was absolutely wrong in Hook not to do his utmost to carry out his duties properly.  Nay, he had trifled with the public money in the same liberal—­perhaps a more liberal—­spirit as if it had been his own—­made advances and loans here and there injudiciously, and taken little heed of the consequences.  Probably, at this day, the common opinion acquits Hook of a designed and complicated fraud; but common opinion never did acquit him of misconduct, and even by his friends this affair was looked upon with a suspicion that preferred silence to examination.

But why take such pains to exonerate Hook from a charge of robbery, when he was avowedly guilty of as bad a sin, of which the law took no cognizance, and which society forgave far more easily than it could have done for robbing the State?  Soon after his return from the Mauritius, he took lodgings in the cheap, but unfashionable neighbourhood of Somers Town.  Here, in the moment of his misfortune, when doubting whether disgrace, imprisonment, or what not awaited him, he sought solace in the affection of a young woman, of a class certainly much beneath his, and of a character unfit to make her a valuable companion to him.  Hook had received little moral training, and had he done so, his impulses were sufficiently strong to overcome any amount of principle.  With this person—­to use the modern slang which seems to convert a glaring sin into a social misdemeanour—­’he formed a connection.’  In other words, he destroyed her virtue.  Hateful as such an act is, we must, before we can condemn a man for it without any recommendation to mercy, consider a score of circumstances which have rendered the temptation stronger, and the result almost involuntary.  Hook was not a man of high moral character—­very far from it—­but we need not therefore suppose that he sat down coolly and deliberately, like a villain in a novel, to effect the girl’s ruin.  But the Rubicon once passed, how difficult is the retreat!  There are but two paths open to a man, who would avoid living a life of sin:  the one, to marry his victim; the other, to break off the connection before it is too late.  The first is, of course, the more proper course; but there are cases where marriage is impossible.  From the latter a man of any heart must shrink with horror.  Yet there are cases, even, where the one sin will prove the least—­where she who has loved too well may grieve bitterly at parting, yet will be no more open to temptation than if she had never fallen.  Such cases are rare, and it