To avoid it,--wretched man!--or rather
to defer it, if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself
the life of a few breaths more amid the false glitter which was now
less his own than ever,--he made himself guilty of a crime. It was
just the sort of crime, growing out of its artificial state, which
society (unless it should change its entire constitution for this
man's unworthy sake) neither could nor ought to pardon. More safely
might it pardon murder. Fauntleroy's guilt was discovered. He fled;
his wife perished, by the necessity of her innate nobleness, in its
alliance with a being so ignoble; and betwixt her mother's death and
her father's ignominy, his daughter was left worse than orphaned.
There was no pursuit after Fauntleroy. His family connections, who
had great wealth, made such arrangements with those whom he had
attempted to wrong as secured him from the retribution that would
have overtaken an unfriended criminal. The wreck of his estate was
divided among his creditors: His name, in a very brief space, was
forgotten by the multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth
to mouth. Seldom, indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest
former intimates. Nor could it have been otherwise. The man had
laid no real touch on any mortal's heart. Being a mere image, an
optical delusion, created by the sunshine of prosperity, it was his
law to vanish into the shadow of the first intervening cloud. He
seemed to leave no vacancy; a phenomenon which, like many others that
attended his brief career, went far to prove the illusiveness of his
existence.
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