The continually administered cautions, the sense of sustaining anxiety, espionage, criticism, of thus sharing his life, had made it in some sort a burden to the merry _cestui que vie_; and therefore, in the first days of his escape, the realization of the petty persecutions, the irksome advice of the ill-advised Mr. Bonley, shaken off and forever thwarted, seemed to the young man only matter for self-gratulation. In the accumulation of these trifles in his thoughts, he had lost sight of the far-reaching significance of the event until he had reached the haven of Etowah Cove, and his bodily fatigue and distress of mind were somewhat allayed. Then he began to perceive that in this fictitious death a great property had changed hands, a definite right was subverted; a terrible fraud had been practiced on the tenants _per autre vie_, in that the life estate was not yet terminated. Mr. Gerault Bonley was mulcted of his prominence as a ludicrous, pertinacious, troublous bore, and the personality of the company was asserted as possessors of certain rights and large interests of which they were to be bereft through his agency. He was offered his choice,--to stay dead, or to go back and serve a term in the penitentiary for a crime he had never committed, to benefit the financial interests of Mr. Gerault Bonley and his associates. He sought now and again some solace in reflecting upon the hard bargain that Mr. Bonley had driven with the original owner, the poetic justice that his lands should revert to him in his lifetime, their value enhanced a thousandfold by their own inherent natural wealth, which had been merely developed, not bestowed, by the Marble Company. “I have made one poor soul happy, anyhow! It’s just as well that he should get the land before they have sold and shipped all the rock in it. He would have nothing left except a hole in the ground but for this,” he muttered to his pillow. For the Marble Company had been exempted by the terms of the grant from “any impeachment of waste,” and had successfully defended a suit brought by the reversioner, who sought to restrain their operations by showing that not even the surface of his tract would be left to him upon the determination of the estate _per autre vie_. “He never seemed to have any grudge against me, and I can’t say I blame him for being glad I am dead,” said Royce, seeking to gauge the sentiments of the joyful reversioner.