Haldane's Resolve

It was not in accordance with nature nor with Haldane's peculiar temperament that he should remain long under a stony paralysis of shame and despair. Though tall and manlike in appearance, he was not a man. Boyish traits and impulses still lingered; indeed, they had been fostered and maintained longer than usual by a fond and indulgent mother. It was not an evidence of weakness, but rather a wholesome instinct of nature, that his thoughts should gradually find courage to go to that mother as his only source of comfort and help. She, at least, would not scorn him, and with her he might find a less dismal refuge than his narrow cell, should it be possible to escape imprisonment. If it were not, he was too young and unacquainted with misfortune not to long for a few kind words of comfort.

He did not even imagine that Mrs. Arnot, the wife of his employer, would come near him in his deep disgrace. Even the thought of her kindness and his requital of it now stung him to the quick, and he fairly writhed as he pictured to himself the scorn that must have been on Laura's face as she saw him on his way to prison like a common thief.

As he remembered how full of rich promise life was but a few days since, and how all had changed even more swiftly and unexpectedly than the grotesque events of a horrid dream, he bowed his head in his hands and sobbed like a grief-stricken child.