Page 54 (1/1)

But Laura was sleepless and deeply troubled; she had never seen a laborer--much less one of her own acquaintances--in Haldane's condition before; and to her young, innocent h conscious of entire blamelessness, she supposed that she was more directly the cause of Haldane's behavior than was true, and that he was carrying out his threat to destroy himself by reckless dissipation She did not know that he had been beguiled into his , and that he had fallen into the clutches of those who always infest public haunts, and live by preying upon the fast, foolish, and unwary Haldane, from his character and associations, was liable to such an experience whenever circu men with no more principle than he possessed are never safe from disaster, and they who trust the the peculiar temptations and tests to which they would prove unequal Laura could not then kno little she had to do with the treiven, he would probably have met with the salass of punch the sree of discretion that he had learned thus far in life began to desert him; and every man as he becomes intoxicated is first a fool, and then the victie of his voluntary helplessness and degradation

But innocent Laura saw a roic eleue wo a fellow-creature by the sacrifice of herself However, the ood sense, would banish suchwo a bad uilt on the part of the husband, and lifelong, hopeless wretchedness for the wife