Application of The Question

But, surely, the father was grievously in error; his parental
fear, alone, had certainly drawn the picture of his son's reduced
and miserable condition. I had seen nothing of this. I had observed
that he was shy, incommunicative--seeking to avoid me, as, according
to their showing, he had striven to avoid his parents. So far our
experience had been the same. But I had totally failed to perceive
the marks of suffering or of sin which the vivid feelings of the
father on this subject had insisted were so apparent. I had seen
in Edgerton only the false friend, the traitor, stealing like a
serpent to my bower, to beguile from my side the only object which
made it dear to me. I could see in him only the exulting seducer,
confident in his ability, artful in his endeavors, winning in his
accomplishments, and striving with practised industry of libertinism,
in the prosecution of his cruel schemes. I could see the grace of
his bearing, the ease of his manner, the symmetry of his person,
the neatness of his costume, the superiority of his dancing, the
insinuation of his address. I could see these only! That he looked
miserable--that he was thin to meagreness, I had not seen.

Yet, even were it so, what could this prove, as the father had
conclusively shown, but guilt. Poverty could not trouble him--he
had never been an unrequited lover. He had gone along the stream of
society, indifferent to the lures of beauty, and with a bark that
had always appeared studiously to keep aloof from the shores or
shoals of matrimony. If he was miserable, his misery could only come
from misconduct, not from misfortune. It was a misery engendered
by guilt, and what was that guilt? I KNEW that he did not drink;
and was not his course in regard to Kingsley, as narrated by that
person on the night when we went to the gaming-house together--was
not that sufficient to show that he was no gamester, unless he
happened to be one of the most bare faced of all canting hypocrites,
which I could not believe him to be. What remained, but that my
calculations were right? It was guilt that was sinking him, body
and soul, so that his eye no longer dared to look upward--so that
his ear shrunk from the sounds of those voices which, even in the
language of kindness, were still speaking to him in the severest
language of rebuke. And whom did that guilt concern more completely
than myself? Say that the father was to lose his son, his only
son--what was my loss, what was my shame! and upon whom should
the curse most fully and finally fall, if not upon the wrong-doer,
though it so happened that the ruin of the guilty brought with it
overthrow to the innocent scarcely less complete!