From the period of his arrival at Newlands to his departure from the colony, the reader has watched young Lyle's career. Afterwards ruined in fortune, overcome by his evil passions, possessed, so to speak, by a devil, he abjured all allegiance to his country's laws. Branded as a swindler, he resolved on making a new road for himself in the great wilderness of life, where bad men think that the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. The details of that career need not be enlarged upon. Lyle himself related to Gray how the disciples of his evil creed treated him: they abandoned him as recklessly as he would have abandoned them. Tried and convicted of seditious leadership at a time when other nations were shaken to their centre by the thunders of republican eloquence, he was condemned to transportation for life, and Sir John Manvers, striving to suppress the whispers of conscience, reconciled himself to the issue of events by hoping that he had "done the State some service" in substituting for this vicious heir to his title and estate the docile yet manly Gerard. Ah! he _would_ not, he dared not, look into first causes. News came home of the loss of the _Trafalgar_; a list of survivors and of those drowned accompanied the official notification of the event. Sir John Manvers was absent from his wife when informed of the dreadful tidings. He shut himself up for some days, and people looked at him when he emerged from his solitude, and whispers went about--"What a shock Sir John Manvers had sustained in the death of his nephew, or, as people believed him to be, his son, for whom he had formerly done so much, but who was so incorrigibly vicious." Next Sir John took steps to ascertain, through Sir Adrian Fairfax, all the particulars of Jasper's marriage with Eleanor Daveney. He had heard of the birth of a son, and he received with breathless thankfulness of heart the tidings of poor little Francis Lyle's death. He tried to wash his brain of these awful realities; he at times rejoiced in some of the pleasantest things that life could give--a lovely wife, with the sweetest temper and the firmest principles, graced his hearth; beautiful children made his lofty halls musical with laughter; many partings and meetings had endeared him more and more to that beloved wife, those noble-looking children. He was in the prime of life, and had won many laurels; but he was restless, eager for command, impatient of solitude, yet reserved and abstracted in society. He could not keep away the dread remorse that haunted him. All the sophistry in the world could not veil the sin he had committed against the helpless, unoffending infant, the melancholy legacy of his ill-starred Mary. True, he had a strange facility of suppressing deadly memories by the aspirations of some new ambition; but there were times when, like our fallen parents at noon-day in the garden, he "heard the voice of God," and was "afraid."