f consolation, and in the diversion it offered, let
the remembrance of this last bitter experience pass slowly from my mind.
The fact that Mr. Delafield left town shortly after his interview with
me, and smitten by shame perhaps, forbore to acquaint us with his
whereabouts or afflict us with his letters, may have aided me in this
strange forgetfulness.

"But other and sharper trials were in store; trials that were to test me
as a man, and as it proved, find me lacking just where I thought I was
strongest. Paula, that saying of the Bible, 'Let him that thinketh he
standeth take heed lest he fall,' might have been written over the door
of my house on that day, ten months ago, when we two stood by the
hearthstone and talked of the temptations that beset humanity, and the
charity we should show to such as succumb to them. Before the day had
waned, my own hour had come; and not all the experience of my life, not
all the resolves, hopes, fears of my later years, not even the
remembrance of your sweet trust and your natural recoil from evil, were
sufficient to save me. The blow came so suddenly! the call for action
was so peremptory! One moment I stood before the world, rich, powerful,
honored, and beloved; the next, I saw myself threatened with a loss that
undermined my whole position, and with it the very consideration that
made me what I was. But I must explain.

"When I entered the Madison Bank as President, I gave up in deference to
the wishes of Mr. Stuyvesant all open speculation in Wall Street. But a
wife and home such as I then had, are not to be supported on any petty
income; and when shortly after your entrance into my home, the
opportunity presented itself of investing in a particularly promising
silver mine out West, I could not resist the temptation; regarding the
affair as legitimate, and the hazard, if such it were, one that I was
amply able to bear. But like most enterprises of the kind, one dollar
drew another after it, and I soon found that to make available what I
had already invested, I was obliged to add to it more and more of my
available funds, until--to make myself as intelligible to you as I
can--it had absorbed not only all that had remained to me after my
somewhat liberal purchase of the Madison Bank stock, but all I could
raise on a pledge of the stock itself. But there was nothing in this to
alarm me. I had a man at the mine devoted to my interests; and as the
present yield was excellent, and the