“I have heard of men making away with themselves on the very eve of some event which would have made a complete change in their fortunes,” he thought presently. “I never read the story of a suicide that did not seem more or less the story of a fool. No, my death shall never make a paragraph for a newspaper. I must be very hard pushed when I come to that. This place gives me the blue-devils, and everything looks black to me out here. I wish Abel Janz Tasman and Captain Cook had perished before ever they sighted this dismal land. I wish all the lot of petty Dutch traders and navigators had come to an untimely end before ever they discovered any one of these miserable islands, which have been a paradise for convicts and scoundrels, and a hell for gentlemen, during the last half-century. How was I to know, when I bought a commission in her Majesty’s service, that the first stage on the road to martial glory was to be the post of head-gaoler at a settlement in the Antipodes? The papers talk of a change in the transportation system, a change that will rid Van Diemen’s Land of its present delightful inhabitants; but no change is likely to come about in my time. I shall have to drag my chain out to the last link, I dare say. It’s better to be born lucky than rich, says the proverb; but how about the poor devils who are neither rich nor lucky?” A rap on the little door, that opened out of the sitting-room on to a patch of garden which lay between the house and the high road, startled Mr. Lowther out of his long reverie. “It’s the fellow with the letters,” he cried; and before Francis Tredethlyn could emerge from the inner room, his master had opened the door, and had taken a little packet of letters, newspapers, and magazines from the man who brought them. “One from my mother; one from--yes--from Maude, at last; the _Times_, _Punch_, _Blackwood’s_, _United Service_, and the lawyer’s letter!--‘Francis Tredethlyn, Esq.!’ eh? The legacy must be something more than five hundred, my man, or they’d hardly dub you Esquire.” He tossed the letter over to his servant as he spoke, and looked at the Cornishman furtively, with something like envy expressed in his look. Francis Tredethlyn received the lawyers’ epistle very coolly, and retired into the adjoining room to read it, while his master sat at the table in the parlour, tearing off the flimsy envelope of a letter with a hasty nervous hand. “From Maude!” he muttered. “At last, my lady: at last, at last!” The letter was a very long one, written in a clear and bold yet sufficiently feminine hand, on slippery pink paper scented with a perfume that had survived an Australian voyage. The contents of the letter must have been tolerably pleasing to Harcourt Lowther, for he smiled as he read, and seemed to forget all about Francis Tredethlyn’s legacy.