Driven to Bay, Volume I by Florence Marryat

On the same evening that the newly-appointed officer of the _Pandora_ was congratulating himself on his good luck, and trying to deceive himself into believing he was in love with the girl he was engaged to marry, a very different scene was being enacted in a furnished lodging in one of the smaller streets of Pimlico. The chief actor there was also a man -- young, good-looking, and a gentleman -- but with distinct traces on his countenance of the tempest of passions and vices he had passed through. He called himself Godfrey Harland. He was a fine, well-built man, with dark hair, an olive complexion, and a black moustache. His eyes, which were also dark and piercing, were set too near his nose for honesty, and had a cunning, distrustful look in them. His mouth was small, with thin compressed lips that covered a set of strong white teeth, and his jaw was heavy and determined. As he sat, pondering over his past and his future, with a cigar between his lips, and a glass of brandy and water in his hand, he looked evil, and almost dangerous. Godfrey Harland had had a chequered life. His father had possessed a large fortune, and given his son, whilst young, the advantages not only of a liberal education and college training, but unlimited money to supply himself with all the luxuries, and indulge in all the dissipations of life.

But one day the crash came. Godfrey's father lost all his money in that great lottery which has ruined so many thousands, the Stock Exchange, and his son suffered with him. He was at once withdrawn from college, his ample allowance was stopped, and he was told he must go out into the world and support himself. With some great souls a reverse of fortune proves a stimulus to exertion, and is the test that brings out their virtues. But weaker natures fail under it, and Godfrey Harland's nature was essentially weak. By reason of his father's former influence in the city, he was soon installed as clerk in one of the best-known London firms. Before he had been there three months, however, a mysterious forgery was committed by some one in the house, and before the offender could be discovered Godfrey had fled to America, thereby leaving a dark suspicion on his own name.