“Why don’t they kill themselves?” muttered the ensign; “they could drive rusty nails into their veins, and make an end of themselves somehow. There are plenty of poisonous things in my garden that they might eat, and make a finish of their lives that way; but they don’t. They go on day after day drudging and toiling, and enduring their lives, somehow or other. I suppose they hope to get away some day. How ever should I bear my life if I didn’t hope to get away--if I didn’t hope it would come to an end pretty soon?” Mr. Lowther, having exhausted the pleasure to be derived from a contemplation of the convicts, took to pacing up and down the two rooms; in the inner of which Francis Tredethlyn was busy cleaning his master’s guns. Walking backwards and forwards, and backwards and forwards, and passing the valet every time, Harcourt Lowther was fain to talk to him; rather for the pleasure and relief of hearing his own voice, than from any desire to be friendly towards his vassal. “No letter yet, Tredethlyn?” he said. “No, sir; but it may come any day.” “And you wait for it as quietly as if a legacy, more or less, was nothing to you. I suppose if they send you a remittance, you’ll be wanting to buy your discharge, and leave this place; and I shall have to get another servant,--some awkward, ignorant boor, perhaps?” “I don’t know about that, sir. There’s plenty as good as me, I dare say, among our fellows. Other folks may have been brought up respectably, and taken to soldiering, like me. And as for buying my discharge, I don’t say but I should be glad to do that, if those lawyer people gave me the chance. I should be glad to get back to England and see my little cousin Susy. I always call her little Susy, because I can’t help thinking of her as she was when I remember her first, when she and I were boy and girl sweethearts together. I’ve thought of her a deal since I got the news of her father’s death, and I feel anxious about her, somehow or other, when I fancy her left alone among strangers.” Harcourt Lowther, always walking backwards and forwards between the two rooms, was in the sitting-room when his servant said this. He stopped to look out of the window again, and there seemed to be a kind of dismal fascination for him in the convicts, towards whom his eyes wandered in a moody, absent-minded stare. “And where do you expect to find her--your cousin, I mean--when you do go back to England?” he asked presently. “At the old farm, sir, to be sure. Where should I find her but there? Poor little soul! she’s never known any other home but that, and isn’t likely to leave it in a hurry of her own free will.”