A complete change, which might have been dated from the above conversation, appeared to have taken place in Alice Coverdale. Instead of shrinking, as she had hitherto done, from society, she rather courted it than otherwise--ordering the carriage, and visiting the different families in the neighbourhood, without consulting Harry on the subject, or seeming to care in the slightest degree whether he accompanied her or not. At first this conduct on his wife’s part occasioned Coverdale the greatest uneasiness; but, after a time, seeing that she was amused and interested by the new acquaintances she thus formed, he began to hope that good might perhaps come out of evil, and that the intimacies then commenced might afford sources of lasting pleasure when the feeling of pique which had led her to seek them should have long since died away. And so the time glided on, working its usual changes in men and things as it passed away. Mr. Gouger having ventured one day to commit himself to the rash assertion that Markum was sinking rapidly, and could not possibly survive the week, from that hour the gamekeeper began to amend, and had sufficiently advanced in his progress towards recovery to be able to appear and give evidence in person, when Jack Hargrave and his accomplice took their trial at the next assizes. So unmistakeably was their guilt brought home to them, that they were each sentenced to seven years’ transportation, and would probably Have had fourteen allotted to them, but for the thorough good faith with which Harry redeemed his promise to Alice that every extenuating circumstance should be clearly placed before the jury. Indeed he laboured so strenuously to impress this point upon the counsel for the prisoners, that the learned brother, entertaining a proper degree of professional scepticism in regard to the purity of human motives, immediately settled, to his own satisfaction, that Jack Hargrave must be a natural son of the late Admiral Coverdale, commended, with his dying breath, to his nephew’s especial care and protection. Alice received the news of the verdict with great _sang froid_, merely remarking that she had felt certain all along that it would be so; but when she had gained the privacy of her own chamber, she indulged in a hearty flood of tears, occasioned as much by what she was pleased to consider her husband’s inhumanity, as by her compassion for the poor woman and her transcendental baby.