Francis Tredethlyn sat with his face hidden in his hands, thinking of his folly, and hating himself for it. Why had he given himself up body and soul into the power of Harcourt Lowther? why had he been so poor a dupe in the toils of this man? It was not that he had entertained any special regard for the gentleman who had pretended to be his friend. In Van Diemen’s Land he had often had good reason to despise the peevish grumbler, the selfish Sybarite; and yet for the last year he had taken the man’s dictum upon every subject, even upon that one vital question on which the happiness of his life depended. Why had he trusted so blindly; why had he submitted so slavishly to follow the guiding-strings that led him into places where he found no pleasure, amongst people who inspired him with disgust? Little by little the answers to these questions shaped themselves in Francis Tredethlyn’s mind; and he saw that his uncle Oliver’s hoarded wealth had been at the root of all his misery. The wealth which had lifted him suddenly into a world that was strange to him; the wealth which had made him the mark for every schemer; the wealth which had won him the hand of the woman whose heart could never have been won by his true and honest love. Adrift in that strange world, the man who had kept his name unsullied, his soul untainted, his head erect before the faces of his fellow-men, while his pockets were empty, and his very existence dependent upon the day’s work that earned him a day’s food, found himself all at once the most helpless creature that had ever floated at the mercy of the winds and waves upon a trackless ocean; and he had been very glad to grasp the first rope that was thrown out to him in all friendly seeming to guide him safely to the shore. His ignorance had flung him, unarmed and powerless, into Harcourt Lowther’s arms; and the man to whom he had felt himself superior while blacking his boots and obeying his orders out in Van Diemen’s Land became all at once, indeed, the master, free to work his own will with that most helpless of all creatures, an uneducated millionaire. “If I had a son,” thought Francis Tredethlyn,--and a faint thrill was stirred in his breast by the mere hypothesis,--“I should send him to school before I turned him out into the world. Yet I, who am as ignorant as a baby of the world in which I live, have plunged recklessly into its vortex, expecting to emerge unhurt. My own folly is the cause of my destruction. And yet I might have met with an honest friend; I might have had a loving wife.” “A loving wife!” Ah, how the poor faithful heart ached as Francis thought this! A man’s fireside is the same peaceful sanctuary, whether the hearth is gorgeous with encaustic tiles and an Axminster rug, or poorly covered with a scrap of faded Kidderminster, in some humble chamber where the firelight glimmers on the delf platters that adorn a cottage-dresser.