It is a fact nevertheless that his was a nature capable of great things, it is also a fact that he had long ago been deeply and bitterly contrite for the original dishonesty of using the money of his client.

But by aid of those strange perversities of nature, he had by this time honestly and sincerely got to regard all their subsequent employments of it merely as efforts on his part to make right an original wrong.

He wanted to repair his fault, and it seemed to him that to commit it again was the only means at his disposal for doing so.

A strain, too, of Puritan piety was bound up in the constitution of his soul, and in private life he exercised high morality, and was also kind and charitable.

He belonged to guilds and societies that had as their object the improvement and moral advancement of young men.