He was growing well-to-do, was putting by money, even while he stifled his conscience as to the way in which it was acquired; almost he had begun to forget that he, a gentleman, a King's sailor, with no worse faults originally than those of dissipation and a love for gambling, had been ruined, degraded, disgraced by a scheming scoundrel. And, also, almost was he forgetting that he had sworn to have an awful vengeance on this scoundrel, this man who had deprived him of the woman he loved and had caused her to cast him off. He came nigh to forgetting that his mother died of a broken heart--a heart broken by his ruin and disgrace. "Ay," he said to himself, as now he dressed in preparation for his day's work, "ay! I had almost forgotten. Almost! And then he must needs find his way here, as full of evil as before. And the bait took--he swallowed it greedily. Anne's sister--I--my mother--the woman I worshipped, are not enough. He is a cormorant of cruelty, and seeks still more victims. Well--there shall be more. His craft and devilish subtlety shall find another. Yet how--how--how is it to be done? I must think." It was still early, not yet seven o'clock, but because of evil habits which he had contracted of late years, and which he could not now break off, much as he endeavoured to do so, he went to a side table where, taking up a dram bottle--a thing always to his hand now--he drank from it. "It nerves me," he muttered. "It will serve me till it kills me at the last. And it clears my mind. Others it makes drunk, but me it fortifies--at present!" He did not drink again, however; did not pour down glass after glass--such an act as that was reserved for the nights when he stupefied himself regularly ere seeking that sleep which never came easily; instead, he put the bottle away, after standing regarding it fixedly. "Strange," he muttered, "strange. Glastonbury is drinking himself to death at Ratisbon, they say, because he possesses Sophy, but not her love; I am drinking myself to death here because she loved me--perhaps loves me now--and I have lost her. Through him, that venomous snake; that reptile!" An onlooker might almost have thought, could one have been present, that the wretched, broken man had taken his dram and was indulging in such thoughts with a view to strengthening himself in some resolve that he had made. Would have thought so could he, that observer, have seen Lewis Granger go to a cupboard next, and, plunging his hand in, draw forth a sword in its scabbard. A naval sword, the handle of which he grasped, bringing out from the sheath, as he did so, but half a blade--a blade broken short off halfway down. The onlooker might have thought so if he had seen the man turn up the scabbard now, and let the other half of the weapon fall out with a clang to the floor.