Fauntleroy

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.