“O yes; that’s all very well!” muttered Mr. Lowther peevishly, after having read this part of Miss Hillary’s epistle twice over; “but Lionel Hillary’s daughter with fifty thousand pounds or so, and without a penny, are two very different people. Not but what she’s always a beautiful girl and a charming girl; but a man can have his pick of charming and beautiful girls, if _that’s_ all he wants to set him up in life. I love her, Heaven knows; and the sight of her writing sends a thrill through my veins like the touch of her hand, or the fluttering of her breath upon my cheek. But poverty makes a man practical, and I think I never read a letter that had less of the practical in it than this letter. It’s a woman’s epistle all over. We must be patient, and wait till we’re worn out by waiting, and the engagement between us becomes a chain that binds us both from better things, and the sound of each other’s name becomes a nuisance to us from its associations of trouble and responsibility. That’s what a long engagement generally comes to. If I’d distinguished myself in India, led a desperate charge against orders, or taken the gate of an Affghan fortress, or done something reckless and mad-headed and lucky, and could have gone back with a captaincy, and a dash of newspaper celebrity about my name, I might have hoped that old Hillary, in a moment of maudlin after-dinner generosity, would have given his consent to my marriage with Maude. But how am I to present myself at Twickenham, and say, ‘I have been taking care of convicts for the last two years,--not particularly well, for more convicts have escaped into the bush in my time than in any other man’s time, according to the reports,--and I have come back to England with the same rank that I had when I left, and with less money than I took away with me’? Can I go to Lionel Hillary and say that? Is that the sort of argument which will induce a man to give me his daughter and her fortune?” He went back to Miss Hillary’s letter. It was only a frivolous letter, after all; and it contained more intelligence about a morning concert in Hanover Square, a regatta at Ryde, and a preternaturally sagacious Skye-terrier, than was likely to be gratifying to a discontented exile at Port Arthur. But Mr. Lowther was fain to content himself as he might with the pretty girlish gossip. It was something, after all his grumbling, to receive the assurance that he was not entirely forgotten by the only daughter and sole heiress of one of the richest merchants in the city of London. He looked up presently from his letter, to see Francis Tredethlyn standing in the doorway between the two rooms, pale to the lips, and clutching at his throat as if he had some difficulty in breathing. “What’s the matter, man?” asked the ensign; “hasn’t the old chap left you any money, after all?”