A grateful look told the joy of his heart, as he hastened away.  In one hour the furniture which the day before had been forcibly taken away, was at his own door.

Relief from present embarrassment, and a fair prospect of a full support for the future, gave Wilmer a lighter heart than he had carried in his bosom for many months.  The reaction made him for a time happy.  But, while our hearts are evil, we cannot be happy, except for brief periods.  The disease will indicate by pain its deep-rooted presence.

The drooping form of his wife soon called his thoughts back to misery.  Health had wandered away, and the smiling truant strayed so long, that hope of her return had almost forsaken them.

Nearly five years had passed since Constance turned away, almost broken-hearted, from the door-stone of her father’s house; and during all that long, long time, she had received no token of remembrance.  She dared not suffer herself to think even for a moment on the cruel fact.  The sudden, involuntary remembrance of such a change from the fondest affection to the most studied disregard, would almost madden her.

As for Wilmer, the recollection of the past was as a thorn in his pillow, too often driving sleep from a wearied frame, that needed its health-restoring influence.  And often, deep and bitter were his self-reproaches.  But for his fatal and half-insane abandonment of himself to the vain hope of gaining a foothold by which he might rapidly elevate his condition for the sake of Constance, he was now conscious that, slowly, but surely, he would have risen, by the power of an internal energy of character.  And more deeply conscious was he, that, but for the half-intoxicated condition in which he was when he consented to go to a gaming-house, he never would have abandoned himself to gaming and drinking as he did for two long years of excited hopes, and dark, gloomy despondency.  Two years, that broke down his spirits, and exhausted the energies of his physical system.  Two years, from whose sad effects, neither mind nor body was ever again able to recover.

But now let us turn from the cast-off, from the forsaken, to the parents who had estranged themselves from their child.

A foreign arrival had brought letters from Mr. Jackson’s agent in Holland, containing information of a great fall in tobacco.  Large shipments had been made by several houses, and especially by that of Mr. Jackson, in anticipation of high prices resulting from a scarcity of the article in the German markets.  But the shipments had been too large, and a serious decline in price was the consequence.  Any interruption of trade, by which the expectation of profits entertained for months is dashed to the ground in a moment, has, usually, the effect to make the merchant unhappy for a brief period.  It takes some time for the energies of his mind, long directed in one course, to gather themselves up again, and bend to some new scheme of profit.  The “tobacco speculation” of 18—­, had been a favourite scheme of Mr. Jackson’s, and he had entered into it more largely than any other American house.  Its failure necessarily involved him in a heavy loss.