Ah! how often he had done so before, and how often they had failed.

He had not yet learned the lesson which David learned by sad experience; "Then I said, it is mine own infirmity, _but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High_." That, too, was an eventful night for Montagu.

He had grown of late far more thoughtful than before; under Edwin's influence he had been laying aside, one by one, the careless sins of school life, and his tone was nobler and manlier than it had ever been.

Montagu had never known or heard much about godliness; his father, a gentleman, a scholar, and a man of the world, had trained him in the principles of refinement and good taste, and given him a high standard of conventional honor; but he passed through life lightly, and had taught his son to do the same.
Possessed of an ample fortune, which Montagu was to inherit, he troubled himself with none of the deep mysteries of life, and "Pampered the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use; Nursing in some delicious solitude His dainty love and slothful sympathies." But Montagu in Edwin's sick-room and by his death bed; in the terrible storm at the Stack, and by contact with Dr.Rowlands' earnestness, and Mr.Rose's deep, unaffected, sorrow-mingled piety; by witnessing Eric's failures and recoveries; and by beginning to take in his course the same heartfelt interest which Edwin taught him--Montagu, in consequence of these things, had begun to see another side of life, which awoke all his dormant affections and profoundest reasonings.

It seemed as though, for the first time, he began to catch some of "The still gad music of humanity," and to listen with deep eagerness to the strain.