So the matter was soon accomplished, and a correspondence with Messrs. Dugald Curry & Co. ended in Derval finding himself elected to seek his bread upon the waters as middy on board the good ship _Amethyst_ of London, 700 tons register, Captain Philip Talbot commander, bound for Rio Janeiro. From this we may fully gather that the once tender husband that loved so well the gentle Mary, and whose whole thought was the future welfare of their only child, was a sorely changed man now, under the influence of another woman and his new surroundings. With the removal of the picturesque little cottage of Finglecombe and the erection of a florid and pretentious villa in its place, the old life had passed away, and with it many a memory of the innocent and loving, if anxious, past. Greville Hampton had become almost callous in his worldliness; a slave to chance impulses, to gratified avarice, to feverish acquisitiveness, and the love that had whilom been absorbed by the son of Mary, was now shared, and more than shared, yea, usurped, by the younger born of Anne Rookleigh. Derval, whom he was sending forth into the cold and bitter world so early in life, in his tender years, as a poor sailor boy, was the same son for whom, in the days of his more limited means, he had longed for wealth, and now--now when wealth was coming upon him--he could look on Anne's face, and into her false eyes of golden hazel, and thrust back the thoughts that at times reproached him. Could it really be that he--Greville Hampton--was doing this without a necessity therefor? But true it is, that "one's memory is apt to grow rusty with respect to one's old self, and we nearly always look upon ourselves as the products of certain causes, setting down anything unsatisfactory to the charge of training and circumstances." Yet, as in every parting there is an image of death, in the departure of Derval it seemed for a time to Greville Hampton as if Mary was dying again. The day before he was to leave, Derval went alone to her grave, to read again the words--how well he knew them!--on the little cross at the head of the dear mound, and to take farewell of her, as it were--that turfy mound, to him the most hallowed spot on earth, yea, hallowed as that on which the Angel of God once alighted; and waves of feeling seemed to swell painfully up in his little heart as he turned slowly to leave the spot, for years--perhaps for ever. Often in the lonely watches of the night, under the glory of the southern skies, or in dark and stormy hours, when the bleak wind blustered aloft and bellied out the close-reefed topsails, when giant waves came thundering from windward to wash the deck and gorge the lee-scuppers, making the stout ship reel like a toy in the perilous trough of the sea, did the sailor boy's thoughts fly back to that peaceful grave and his farewell visit there.