was soon played out. It was
substantially his father's over again. He ran through what was left of
his money in a little over a year--so splendid were the gambler's
opportunities in these days; for the Georgian era had still a short
lease of years to run, and folly dies hard. His attempts to reinstate
himself at the expense of a Bank, by a simple process of burglary, in
partnership with a professional hand whose acquaintance he had made at
"The Tun," led to disastrous failure and the summary conviction of both
partners.

None of this came to the knowledge of his wife, as how should it? He
wrote no news of it to her, and their relation was known to very few.
Moreover, the burglary was in Bristol and Polly was at a farmhouse in
Lincolnshire, awaiting a birth which only added another grief to her
life, for her child was born dead. She recovered from a long illness
which swallowed up the remains of the money her husband had given her,
to find herself destitute and minus most of the good looks which had
obtained for her her previous situation. She succeeded thereafter in
maintaining herself by needlework--she was an adept in that--and so
avoided becoming an incumbrance on her family, which she could no longer
help now as she had done in her prosperity. But of her worthless
husband's fate she never knew anything, the trial having taken place
during an illness which nearly ended all her miseries for her. By the
time she was on the way to recovery it would have been difficult to
trace her husband, even had she had any motive for doing so.

As for him--a convict and the son of a convict--his period of detention
in the hulks on the Thames was followed by the usual voyage to the
Antipodes; but this time the vessel into which he was transhipped at
Sydney sailed for Norfolk Island, not Hobart Town nor Macquarie Harbour.
Maisie's son was not destined to revisit the land of his birth. The
early deliverance from actual bondage to a condition free in all but
the name, which had led to his father's successful later career, was
impossible in an island half the size of the Isle of Wight, and the man
grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every
stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of
any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the
prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the loveliest
islands in the Pacific.

After his departure his mother may ha