Many years before, the elder Mr Grey, whose real name was that of a well-known Welsh family, the Gwynneths of Maerdoc, to which he belonged, had fallen into terrible trouble. He was poor at the time, though with good prospects, well-intentioned, honourable and affectionate, but dangerously reckless and impulsive, and in consequence of this, though from no actual wrong-doing of his own, seriously, considering his circumstances, in debt. The details of his position need not be entered into, as they bear little upon his history, beyond saying that they were shared, more than shared indeed, and had been greatly caused by a friend of his, the Ernest Fitzmaurice of my narrative. But Ernest was a man of very different character. He was calculating and unscrupulous, thought highly of in some quarters even, though not by his own family, as my father recollected. The two, by an unfortunate coincidence, were staying in the same house on a visit, when their troubles came to a crisis. An extraordinary robbery took place--I am not sufficiently "up" in such matters to give full particulars as to the nature of the bonds or documents stolen, but they were such as _might_ have been utilised with safety by the thief. Such, however, was not the case. They were traced to young Gwynneth, who was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years' penal servitude. The blow fell on his family with appalling horror. But no one, not even his devoted sisters or his boy brother Caryll, his nearest relations, felt it more terribly to all appearance than his friend, Fitzmaurice, at that time the _fiance_ of Jessie Gwynneth. He exerted himself frantically to have the sentence mitigated, but to no avail. And the dogged silence maintained by the prisoner, whose whole nature seemed changed, added enormously to the weight of evidence against him. What his sisters thought during the term of his imprisonment never transpired. Afterwards, I have always suspected, and as far as regards the brother I indeed _know_, that his family came to believe him entirely innocent. Things grew easier for them, materially speaking, by a moderate fortune being left to them shortly before the elder brother's imprisonment terminated. But he came back to them an utterly crushed, broken, and aged man, to find the "girls" he had left in little better case than himself. Only the youngest of the four, Caryll, despite the accident which had made him a life-long cripple, retained any cheerful or hopeful hold on life.