would amount to a practical acknowledgment of the justice of Michael’s charge against him.  He wrote to his brother in the most forbearing terms.  The answer received was as offensive as words could make it.  Michael had inherited his father’s temper, unredeemed by his father’s better qualities:  his second letter reiterated the charges contained in the first, and declared that he would only accept the offered division as an act of atonement and restitution on Andrew’s part.  I next wrote to the mother to use her influence.  She was herself aggrieved at being left with nothing more than a life interest in her husband’s property; she sided resolutely with Michael; and she stigmatized Andrew’s proposal as an attempt to bribe her eldest son into withdrawing a charge against his brother which that brother knew to be true.  After this last repulse, nothing more could be done.  Michael withdrew to the Continent; and his mother followed him there.  She lived long enough, and saved money enough out of her income, to add considerably, at her death, to her elder son’s five thousand pounds.  He had previously still further improved his pecuniary position by an advantageous marriage; and he is now passing the close of his days either in France or Switzerland—­a widower, with one son.  We shall return to him shortly.  In the meantime, I need only tell you that Andrew and Michael never again met—­never again communicated, even by writing.  To all intents and purposes they were dead to each other, from those early days to the present time.

“You can now estimate what Andrew’s position was when he left his profession and returned to England.  Possessed of a fortune, h e was alone in the world; his future destroyed at the fair outset of life; his mother and brother estranged from him; his sister lately married, with interests and hopes in which he had no share.  Men of firmer mental caliber might have found refuge from such a situation as this in an absorbing intellectual pursuit.  He was not capable of the effort; all the strength of his character lay in the affections he had wasted.  His place in the world was that quiet place at home, with wife and children to make his life happy, which he had lost forever.  To look back was more than he dare.  To look forward was more than he could.  In sheer despair, he let his own impetuous youth drive him on; and cast himself into the lowest dissipations of a London life.

“A woman’s falsehood had driven him to his ruin.  A woman’s love saved him at the outset of his downward career.  Let us not speak of her harshly—­for we laid her with him yesterday in the grave.