For some time after he had abjured his military career, it was his policy to keep up an outward show of kindness to me: he actually succeeded in making some think he was an ill-used man; and when those who were charitable enough to believe him more unfortunate than vicious would invite us to their houses; he would insist on my going. If I remonstrated, heaven help me! He is dead, and I forgive him all his trespasses: were he living, I could not confess to any man that he has sometimes taken me by the hair of my head, and swung me round the apartment, till, terrified, dizzy, and blind, I have fainted. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ We had a wicked servant too, a Malay woman, who hated me, and who was readily persuaded into spreading a report that I was ill-tempered. My poor father managed, in spite of difficulties, to make us an allowance that would have been amply sufficient for our wants had my husband been a reasonable being; but a man utterly devoid of principle, and angrily deploring the ruin he has brought upon himself, is _not_ a reasonable being. My wretched partner for life grew frantic at last with rage and disappointment when Sir Adrian Fairfax found it necessary to denounce him as a swindler; for, some of the better class of merchants, deceived by his plausibility, were disposed to trust him; and he had the hardihood to expect that Sir Adrian, for the sake of my family, would place him in a situation, with certain emoluments, at the request of the most influential men connected with the commerce and the diplomacy of the Cape Colony. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Much that I have last noted down has been drawn from communications passing between my father, Sir Adrian, and some other gentlemen, who were anxious, if possible, to save Lyle from utter ruin. His reputation was irretrievably gone; but they would still have given him, if they could, the means of existence. Sir Adrian, however, could not in honour permit this; and I was beginning to consider where we should hide our heads, at any rate till after my infant's birth, when one morning I discovered that the little money we had had in the house had been taken from my desk. My husband had departed. Whither, it was not easy to say. We traced him into Kafirland. I sought the shelter of my father's house. My mother opened her arms to receive me. You see her sometimes look reproachingly upon me. She derives such unmitigated relief at the idea of my release from bondage by the death of my miserable husband, that she grows angry at times because I mourn the wasted years I have passed, and have no heart to meet the future.