At first there was in Henry Morton’s face and manner a kind of sullen, brutish ferocity, which made him so unpopular that he was finally dismissed by his employer, and cast upon the world, a desperate man, with nothing to do, nothing to live for, his home desolated, his wife lost, and himself dishonored. Falling in with a set of the New York roughs who live mostly by theft and fraud, he went rapidly from bad to worse, becoming such an expert in robbery that he was always put to do the work inside, while his comrades watched without. Thus it happened that he was found in Roy Leighton’s house, and afterward identified by Russell, who knew him by a defect in his right eye, which had been put out when he was a boy. Although he gave an assumed name, it came out at the trial who he was, and that he had a wife, whom he had abandoned. Then came the verdict of the jury, the sentence to the penitentiary, followed swiftly by escape, and the forgetfulness by the public, as is usual in New York; where robberies are so common, and escape from justice not unfrequent. A year went by, and Georgie received a letter from her husband, telling her he was dying of an incurable disease, among the Alleghany Mountains. Then came a paper containing a notice of his death, and then Jack went himself to the little inland town to make sure that the wretched man was dead. There could be no mistake about it, he thought, and Georgie breathed freer, and urged her brother’s removal to the West, where they were unknown to every one, and where she could begin life anew as GEORGIE HEYFORD, instead of Louise Morton. And so westward they went, settling first upon a farm which Jack worked upon shares, taxing his strength too much, until his health began to fail, and the farm had to be abandoned. The next move was to Chicago, where Jack procured work as half porter, half errand boy, in the store, and rising gradually to a higher place of trust as clerk, and gaining the good opinion of all who came in contact with him. Georgie and his mother supported themselves by plain-sewing and fancy needle-work, while the little Annie was known as the orphan child of a friend of Mrs. Heyford, and Georgie passed for a young girl. Very few people knew her, as she seldom went out except to get or carry work, and her life bade fair to go on in the same quiet, monotonous way, when there came a letter, which changed at once her whole destiny.