For my part I was wholly fearless when I looked forward. My heart beat high. I had but two anxieties: One lest my uncle Johnstone should discover what I was about and stop me by warning the captain of the _Childe Harold_; the other lest Tom at the last should be detained on board the hulk for a later ship. For this latter difficulty I had provided with Will. But as to my uncle and aunt, I told them plainly that I was going out to Tasmania, and that I only waited to learn that Tom was on board the _Childe Harold_ to follow him by the first ship. You will suppose that neither of them had the slightest suspicion that my ship was to be Tom’s convict ship herself. How could such an idea enter their heads unless Will blabbed, which he had taken his oath not to do? Mr. Johnstone could never dream that I meant to dress myself up as a boy and hide under the _Childe Harold’s_ forecastle. One night, and that was the last I spent at his house near the Tower, he talked of my resolution to follow Tom till we rose to high words. Will was out, or I dare say my temper might have brought him to side with his father and mother, which would have raised a feeling between us, and ruined my hopes so far as he went. Mr. Johnstone said he thanked God I was no girl of his. He thanked God his only child was a boy. What would my father, if he were alive, think of my following the fortunes of a convict? I answered that my father was a true man and would always wish me to be a true woman. My father was not a man to oblige me to betray and desert Tom because a dreadful trouble had come upon the poor fellow; and here I cried a little. ‘Still, my dear, Captain Butler is a convict,’ said my aunt. ‘I wish to say nothing about his guilt or innocence, but he wears felon’s clothes, he is loaded with irons; he lives with the scum of the nation----’ ‘And, guilty or innocent, he is irrecoverably disgraced,’ broke in my uncle. ‘Why did you undertake his defence, then?’ I cried. ‘A man is innocent till he is proved guilty,’ answered my uncle. ‘By the logic of the law I undertook the defence of a guiltless person.’ This enraged me. It was like burning or cruelly wounding or torturing me in any savage way to speak ill of Tom or to cast a doubt upon his innocence.