Alfred was right.  The words of Harry were a theory which sounds well enough for advice, but which can never be placed into practice.  The Past! who can forget it?  The Present, with its load of cares; with its hours of happiness and prosperity; with its doubts and anxieties, is not sufficiently powerful to extinguish remembrance of the Past.  The Future, to which we all look for the accomplishment of our designs—­the achievement of our ambitious purposes—­cannot remove the Past.  Both combined are unequal to the task, and the daily life of man proves it so.

The Past! what a train of thought does it suggest!  Aye, the Past, with its pleasures and misfortunes.  It haunts our consciences, and is ever before our eyes.  The murderer, though safely concealed from the world, and who may have escaped punishment by man for years, still has the Past to confront and harass his mind.  Penitence and prayer may lighten, but can never remove it.  Surrounded though he be with health and happiness, the demon of the Past will confront him ever, and make his life wretched.  Oh, what a fearful thing is that same Past, we hear spoken of lightly by those whose lives have been along a smooth and flowery track over the same, and unmarked by a single adversity or crime.  A single deviation from the path of honor, integrity and virtue, and as years roll on the memory of those past hours will cause bitter self-reproach, for it will be irremovable.  So with past happiness as it is with misery and crime.  The beggar can never forget his past joys in contemplating the present or hoping for the future, but it must ever remain a source of never-failing regret and the fountain of unhealable wounds.

The Past!—­but no more of it, as we write the recollection of past happiness and prosperity, of past follies and errors rise up with vividness, and though it is never forgotten, burns with a brighter light than before.

Several days after his conversation with Harry, Alfred received a message from Dr. Humphries requesting him to meet that gentleman at ten o’clock the same morning at his residence.  Accordingly, at the appointed hour, he presented himself to the Doctor, by whom he was received with great cordiality and kindness.

“I have sent for you, Mr. Wentworth,” began the doctor, as soon as Alfred was seated, “to speak with you on a subject which interests you as well as myself.  As you are aware, I promised your wife when she was dying that your remaining child should never want a home while I lived.  This promise I now desire you to ratify by gaining your consent to his remaining with me, at least until he is old enough not to need the care of a lady.”