“Humph!” muttered the officer, “there’s no calculating upon the changes that take place in this world. I never expect to find any thing as I left it when I return to a place or people that I’ve been absent from for any length of time. I expect to find plenty of changes when I get back to the civilised world again. Do you suppose the people _there_ can afford to waste their time thinking of wretched exiles _here_? Life with them is utterly different from what it is with us. When I left England, I was engaged to a beautiful girl with fifty thousand pounds or so for her fortune,--a girl who would have married me, and given me a grand start in life, if it hadn’t been for her father; but do you think I expect to find her in the same mind when I go back? Do you think two years’ absence won’t act as a sponge, and wipe _my_ image out of her thoughts? What has a beautiful, frivolous creature like that to do with constancy? Every man who looks at her falls over head and ears in love with her. She is fed upon flattery and adulation. Is it probable, or natural, or even possible that she will remember _me_?” It was not likely that Mr. Lowther would ask this question of his valet. He asked it of himself, rather, in a peevish and complaining spirit, and seemed to find a dismal comfort in harping on his wrongs and his miseries. “I was a fool to think that Maude Hillary could be constant to me!” he muttered, angrily. In his anger against a world that had treated him so badly, he was angry with himself for having been so much a fool as to expect better treatment. He walked to a little looking-glass hanging over the mantelpiece, and looked at his handsome face. Was it the face of a man who was to have no place in the world? Were his many graces of person, his charm of manner, his versatility of mind, to serve for nothing after all? “When I think of the fellows who get on in the world, I feel inclined to make an end of all this by cutting my throat,” he said, as he frowned at the image in the glass. He felt the region of the jugular vein softly with the ends of his fingers as he spoke, and wondered whether death by the severance of that important artery was a very painful finish for a man to make. He thought of how he might look if Francis Tredethlyn, finding him late to rise one morning, broke into his room and saw him lying in the sunny little chamber deluged with blood and stone dead. He had been very religiously brought up, amongst gentle, true-hearted women; but there was no more pious compunction in his mind as he thought of suicide than there might have been in the mind of an aboriginal inhabitant of the Solomon Islands. He had a mother at home--a mother who believed in him and idolized him, to the disparagement of all other creatures; but no image of her grief and despair arose between him and the scheme of a desperate death. His thoughts travelled in a narrow circle, of which self was the unchanging centre.