He went out into the garden now, to smoke his pipe of bird’s-eye and talk to the convict gardeners, who brightened at his approach, and deliberately planted themselves in a convenient position upon their spades, in order to converse with him. I am sorry to say that he was as much at home in their society as if they had been the most estimable of mankind, and that he encouraged them to talk freely of their burglarious experiences in the Old World. Was there not a smack of brigandage and adventure in these experiences, and even a dash of chivalry, according to the two men’s own showing? for they told stories of encounters in which they shone out quite with heroic lustre from their rooted objection to cut an elderly lady’s throat, and their gallant bearing towards a high-minded young damsel who had led them from room to room in her father’s mansion, and had pointed with her own fair hands to the whereabouts of the family valuables. Francis Tredethlyn sat upon the trunk of a fallen acacia, watching the lazy clouds in the still evening sky, and smoking his pipe, long after the two convicts had struck work and retired to their own quarters. He sat smoking and musing; thinking, as I suppose a man so banished must think, of that other far-away world which he had left behind him; and which it seemed to him sometimes, in such still moments as these, that he should never see again. “So far away, so very far away!” he mused. “I wonder how the little village street upon the hill is looking now? It’s winter time now there, or getting towards winter time anyhow. I can fancy it of an evening, with the lights twinkling in the low shop windows, the big castle-gate frowning down upon the poor little street; the churchyard, where Susy and I have played, all dark and lonesome in the winter night; and Susy herself--pretty little dark-eyed Susy--sitting by the hearth in the big kitchen at Tredethlyn, stitch, stitch, stitch, while the old man nods and snores over his newspaper. Poor little Susy, what a hard life it is for her; and the old man as rich as that king of somewhere--Crœsus, don’t they call him?--if his neighbours are to be believed. Poor little Susy! is she fond of me, I wonder? and will she be pleased to marry me, if ever I’m able to go back, and say, ‘Susy, the best I could do, after running away and ’listing, was to save up money to buy my discharge, so that I might come home again to claim the old promise--for better for worse, for richer or poorer’? We couldn’t well be poorer than we should be just at first; for, of course, the old chap would turn rusty, and cut Susy off with a shilling; but who cares for that?” thought Francis Tredethlyn, snapping his fingers in the independence of his spirit. “If Susy loves me, and I love Susy, and we’re both young and strong and industrious, what’s to prevent us getting on in the world, without anybody’s money to help us?”