been a throwback to some
savage, buccaneering ancestor. To expect him to work, while he could
live in vicious idleness at somebody else's expense, was found to be
hopeless. His debts were paid for about the third or fourth time, and
he was shipped off to the Colonies. Unfortunately, there were no means
of keeping him there. So soon as the money provided him had been
squandered, he returned, demanding more by menaces and threats.
Meeting with unexpected firmness, he seems to have regarded theft and
forgery as the only alternative left to him. To save him from
punishment and the family name from disgrace, his parents' savings were
sacrificed. It was grief and shame that, according to Ellenby, killed
them both within a few months of one another.

Deprived by this blow of what he no doubt had come to consider his
natural means of support, and his sister, fortunately for herself,
being well out of his reach, he next fixed upon his brother Michael as
his stay-by. Michael, weak, timid, and not perhaps without some
remains of boyish affection for a strong, handsome, elder brother,
foolishly yielded. The demands, of course, increased, until, in the
end, it came almost as a relief when the man's vicious life led to his
getting mixed up with a crime of a particularly odious nature. He was
anxious now for his own sake to get away, and Michael, with little
enough to spare for himself, provided him with the means, on the solemn
understanding that he would never return.

But the worry and misery of it all had left young Michael a broken man.
Unable to concentrate his mind any longer upon his profession, his
craving was to get away from all his old associations--to make a fresh
start in life. It was Ellenby who suggested London and the ship
furnishing business, where Michael's small remaining capital would be
of service. The name of Hepworth would be valuable in shipping
circles, and Ellenby, arguing this consideration, but chiefly with the
hope of giving young Michael more interest in the business, had
insisted that the firm should be Hepworth and Co.

They had not been started a year before the man returned, as usual
demanding more money. Michael, acting under Ellenby's guidance,
refused in terms that convinced his brother that the game of bullying
was up. He waited a while, and then wrote pathetically that he was ill
and starving. If only for the sake of his young wife, would not
Michael come and see them?

This wa