Chapter 53 - Page 2

he grew, the more confident
he felt that some interposition must save her from his clutches.
But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to
day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and
ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich,
and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who
tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in
noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and
lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race,
and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or
the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in
seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a
most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and
children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and
estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great
degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful
trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors
gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by
circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but
for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in
peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many
who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned
haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do
otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she
done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice,
misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from
year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to
remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from
the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he
felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little
reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of
distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell
the great amount.

But youth is not prone to contemplate the darkest side of a picture
it can shift at will. By dint of reflecting on what he had to do,
and reviving the train of thought which night had interrupted,
Nicholas gradually summoned up his utmost energy, and when the
morning was sufficiently advanced for his purpose, had no thought
but that of using it to the best advantage. A hasty breakfast
taken, and such affairs of business as required prompt attention
disposed of, he directed his steps to the residence of Madeline
Bray: whither he lost no time in arriving.

It had occurred to him that, very possibly, the young lady might be
denied, although to