I shall never forget the weird experience of my first night there--the intense humid darkness; the awful emphasis the dead silence received from the fitful creeping and falling sounds incidental to a wooded solitude. I hardly slept at all. The echo of a rare footfall in the highroad beyond was always first a solace and then a terror. I would listen for its coming, mark its passing, and when that, owing to the muffling foliage, was seemingly halted or delayed, my heart thickened to a panic of expectation that the thread would be taken up close by--stealthy shufflings about the walls; a scratch on a window-pane. Yet, after all, nothing visited me but ghosts, and with those I was familiar. They came out of dusky nooks and corners, taunting me with my inefficiency, my loneliness, speaking unutterable things of my despicable position, and the neglect which had devoted me to it. Faint glimmering vistas into the past they showed me--glimpses of memory, which flickered only to close. Had I, indeed, always been thus, a burden, an intruder? I knew nothing of it all. My mother, in all my conscious memory of her, had never been my mother but in name. And was there nothing behind her--no shadow, even, of a father’s brief devotion? Sometimes a strange old face, evil and curious, would seem to bend down over me; but it always dissolved before it could be secured. I did not like to think I owed my life to that. And when I slept, I fought and sobbed and struggled in bewildering mists; and the cry was for ever in my heart: “Who am I? Who was my father? Why does she hate me so--on his account or my own?” Well, enough of these moods. I am not built of the stuff which harps on self-grievances to win sympathy. Soon, and very soon, I was to become “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” and from the first moment of my command, I never voluntarily relinquished it. The baby, a poor peakish little male fellow, was born, I say; and I was forgotten. When at last I was remembered, development of nerve and character had so fastened me to my position, that there was no question of ousting me from it against my will. Nor was there much attempt. Lady Skene ignored me; her husband, fatuous father now, laughingly acquiesced in my wilfulness. “Go your own way, Gaskett,” he said. “You’ll come to me when you want me, no doubt.” No doubt at all; but not in the way he foresaw. In the meantime I led the life of a free-forester, and was more genially content than I had been for long. And then one day came the first of the change.