At first, and at irregular intervals, his relatives allowed Fauntleroy a little pittance to sustain life; not from any love, perhaps, but lest poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add more shame to that with which he had already stained them.  But he showed no tendency to further guilt.  His character appeared to have been radically changed (as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the same character, presenting itself in another phase.  Instead of any longer seeking to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to shrink into the nearest obscurity, and to be unseen of men, were it possible, even while standing before their eyes.  He had no pride; it was all trodden in the dust.  No ostentation; for how could it survive, when there was nothing left of Fauntleroy, save penury and shame!  His very gait demonstrated that he would gladly have faded out of view, and have crept about invisibly, for the sake of sheltering himself from the irksomeness of a human glance.  Hardly, it was averred, within the memory of those who knew him now, had he the hardihood to show his full front to the world.  He skulked in corners, and crept about in a sort of noonday twilight, making himself gray and misty, at all hours, with his morbid intolerance of sunshine.

In his torpid despair, however, he had done an act which that condition of the spirit seems to prompt almost as often as prosperity and hope.  Fauntleroy was again married.  He had taken to wife a forlorn, meek-spirited, feeble young woman, a seamstress, whom he found dwelling with her mother in a contiguous chamber of the old gubernatorial residence.  This poor phantom—­as the beautiful and noble companion of his former life had done brought him a daughter.  And sometimes, as from one dream into another, Fauntleroy looked forth out of his present grimy environment into that past magnificence, and wondered whether the grandee of yesterday or the pauper of to-day were real.  But, in my mind, the one and the other were alike impalpable.  In truth, it was Fauntleroy’s fatality to behold whatever he touched dissolve.  After a few years, his second wife (dim shadow that she had always been) faded finally out of the world, and left Fauntleroy to deal as he might with their pale and nervous child.  And, by this time, among his distant relatives,—­with whom he had grown a weary thought, linked with contagious infamy, and which they were only too willing to get rid of,—­he was himself supposed to be no more.

The younger child, like his elder one, might be considered as the true offspring of both parents, and as the reflection of their state.  She was a tremulous little creature, shrinking involuntarily from all mankind, but in timidity, and no sour repugnance.  There was a lack of human substance in her; it seemed as if, were she to stand up in a sunbeam, it would pass right through her figure, and trace out the cracked and dusty window-panes upon the naked floor.  But, nevertheless, the poor child had a heart; and from her mother’s gentle character she had inherited a profound and still capacity of affection.  And so her life was one of love.  She bestowed it partly on her father, but in greater part on an idea.