g it through Sarah Purfoy.

It was peculiar to the man's hard and ungrateful nature that, despite
the attachment of the woman who had followed him to his place of
durance, and had made it the object of her life to set him free, he had
cherished for her no affection. It was her beauty that had attracted
him, when, as Mr. Lionel Crofton, he swaggered in the night-society
of London. Her talents and her devotion were secondary
considerations--useful to him as attributes of a creature he owned, but
not to be thought of when his fancy wearied of its choice. During the
twelve years which had passed since his rashness had delivered him into
the hands of the law at the house of Green, the coiner, he had been
oppressed with no regrets for her fate. He had, indeed, seen and
suffered so much that the old life had been put away from him. When, on
his return, he heard that Sarah Purfoy was still in Hobart Town, he was
glad, for he knew that he had an ally who would do her utmost to help
him--she had shown that on board the Malabar. But he was also sorry, for
he remembered that the price she would demand for her services was his
affection, and that had cooled long ago. However, he would make use of
her. There might be a way to discard her if she proved troublesome.

His pretended piety had accomplished the end he had assumed it for.
Despite Frere's exposure of his cryptograph, he had won the confidence
of Meekin; and into that worthy creature's ear he poured a strange and
sad story. He was the son, he said, of a clergyman of the Church of
England, whose real name, such was his reverence for the cloth, should
never pass his lips. He was transported for a forgery which he did not
commit. Sarah Purfoy was his wife--his erring, lost and yet loved
wife. She, an innocent and trusting girl, had determined--strong in the
remembrance of that promise she had made at the altar--to follow her
husband to his place of doom, and had hired herself as lady's-maid to
Mrs. Vickers. Alas! fever prostrated that husband on a bed of sickness,
and Maurice Frere, the profligate and the villain, had taken advantage
of the wife's unprotected state to ruin her! Rex darkly hinted how
the seducer made his power over the sick and helpless husband a weapon
against the virtue of the wife and so terrified poor Meekin that, had it
not "happened so long ago", he would have thought it necessary to look
with some disfavour upon the boisterous son-in-law of Major Vickers.