Reckless as he was, that consideration stayed his feet on the brink of a sacred threshold which he dared not pass, perhaps to leave it behind him for ever--the threshold of his mother's door.
Strangely as it expressed itself, and irregularly as it influenced his conduct, Zack's love for his mother was yet, in its own nature, a beautiful and admirable element in his character; full of promise for the future, if his father had been able to discover it, and had been wise enough to be guided by the discovery.

As to outward expression, the lad's fondness for Mrs.Thorpe was a wild, boisterous, inconsiderate, unsentimental fondness, noisily in harmony with his thoughtless, rattle-pated disposition.

It swayed him by fits and starts; influencing him nobly to patience and forbearance at one time; abandoning him, to all appearance, at another.

But it was genuine, ineradicable fondness, nevertheless--however often heedlessness and temptation might overpower the still small voice in which its impulses spoke to his conscience, and pleaded with his heart.
Among other unlucky results of Mr.Thorpe's conscientious imprisonment of his son in a merchant's office, was the vast increase which Zack's commercial penance produced in his natural appetite for the amusements and dissipations of the town.

After nine hours of the most ungrateful daily labor that could well have been inflicted on him, the sight of play-bills and other wayside advertisements of places of public recreation appealed to him on his way home, with irresistible fascination.
Mr.Thorpe drew the line of demarcation between permissible and forbidden evening amusements at the lecture-rooms of the Royal and Polytechnic Institutions, and the oratorio performances in Exeter Hall.
All gates opening on the outer side of the boundary thus laid down, were gates of Vice--gates that no son of his should ever be allowed to pass.
The domestic laws which obliged Zack to be home every night at eleven o'clock, and forbade the possession of a door-key, were directed especially to the purpose of closing up against him the forbidden entrances to theaters and public gardens--places of resort which Mr.
Thorpe characterized, in a strain of devout allegory, as "Labyrinths of National Infamy." It was perfectly useless to suggest to the father (as some of Zack's maternal relatives did suggest to him), that the son was originally descended from Eve, and was consequently possessed of an hereditary tendency to pluck at forbidden fruit; and that his disposition and age made it next to a certainty, that if he were restrained from enjoying openly the amusements most attractive to him, he would probably end in enjoying them by stealth.