Mr. Sydney had filled the padlock of the bridge with small stones, and he stood aside with a grave face, looking at the warders as they tried to open it. When they understood the daring trick, one brutal fellow rushed at Sydney and struck him heavily on the face. The old man reeled from the blow, and then recovering himself, turned from the ruffian and looked with disgust and surprise, not at him but at his crowd of fellow-warders. "Stop that!" shouted one of them to Sydney's assailant. "That's no criminal; and this is no criminal's trick." There was no crossing this last canal without a bridge or a plank, for the further side was a brick wall considerably higher than the nearer, designed to prevent escape. By the time the warders had cleared the lock from Sydney's obstructions, his three friends in Mr. Windsor's carriage, driven by Reynolds, were miles on their way toward that gentleman's steam yacht, which awaited them in the harbor of Torquay. CHAPTER XVI. MRS. CAREY'S HUSBAND. Oswald Carey's father had just died and left him a great fortune made upon the Stock Exchange when the son met his wife for the first time at the country-house of his father's old partner and his then executor--Benjamin Bugbee. "Young Croesus," as he was then familiarly called, fell head over heels in love with the beautiful daughter of the penniless and disestablished clergyman, and during the short space of his courtship and honeymoon he forgot the one thing which had previously absorbed his life--the gaming-table. If his wife had been a good woman, or if she had loved him, he might have stayed his hand from baccarat. But Eleanor had married him simply because he was rich and good-natured and she was ambitious and poor; and after their marriage she plunged into the gayest of fashionable society. At first Carey yawned in the anterooms of balls, waiting for his beautiful wife, but after a while he tired of this; and, letting her go into the world alone, he betook himself to the Turf and Jockey Club, where the play ran very high, for there adventurers and gamesters of all nations congregated--the rich Russian met his great rival wheat-grower of America, and the price of great farms changed hands at poker or at baccarat. The hawks who infested the club, eager for the quarry, speedily settled upon such a plump pigeon as Carey, and while his wife wore his diamonds at gay balls, night after night, he sat over the green cloth, throwing away his youth and his fortune to the harpies. It began to be whispered in a few years that "Young Croesus," the beauty's husband, was cleaned out. The hawks found his I. O. U.'s were unredeemed, and his gorgeous establishment in Mayfair was closed. By some influence Carey succeeded in getting an appointment as a clerk in the Stamp and Sealing Wax Office, while his wife went on in her career as a "beauty."