As Captain Arden, of the Dauntless, the Baronet was a morose and exacting commander, a man without one particle of feeling. It is quite sufficient to say he was universally detested by both officers and crew. After succeeding to the baronetcy and the estates, he retired into private life, into which he carried all his morose and unamiable qualities. Always dissatisfied, he declared everything went wrong with him. His eldest daughter married, for love, a poor subaltern, and was banished the paternal mansion—no great punishment. His eldest son remained a gentleman, with nothing to do but to spend in dissipation and excesses of all kinds five times the amount allowed him yearly by his father; the consequences were that he became deeply involved in debt. The youngest son, Howard Etherton, the father’s favourite, was, as our readers know, a midshipman on board the Victory, expecting, through his father’s interest and position, rapid promotion, as soon as his six years’ probation had run out. Howard Etherton’s disposition and nature were utterly unprincipled; he was also, for one so young, parsimonious to a degree; though handsomely allowed by his father, he hoarded all he possibly could spare to suit his own purposes hereafter. He, as well as the rest of the family, knew that his father came into the estates, from the fact of his elder brother having died without heirs; he also knew that there were rumours of his uncle in his youth having carried off a young lady somewhere in Italy, her parents opposing their union; but as years passed over, and no tidings of him reached his family, till an authentic account of his death became circulated, and afterwards fully proved, the previous account of his marriage was considered a mere rumour; and as neither wife nor child made their appearance, Captain Arden’s claims were undisputed. When Howard Etherton therefore heard on board the Victory that the Duchesse de Coulancourt was positively, before she married the Duke, the widow of Mr. Granby Arden, and that a son and daughter by her first husband were living, he became, as we have stated, startled and confounded; for if such was positively the case, and could be proved, his father had no longer a just claim to either the baronetcy or the estates. But when he heard that Mabel Arden had declared that her brother was cruelly murdered at Lyons, he felt singularly relieved. Still, the knowledge that Mabel would be entitled to a very handsome fortune out of the estate especially provided by settlements and deeds appertaining to the Etherton estates, rankled in his heart and ill-regulated mind. It was the intelligence, therefore, that he heard on board the Victory, that he sent in his letter to his father. He also found vent for his hatred to young Thornton, of whom he spoke in the bitterest terms, imputing to his officiousness the recovery of Mabel Arden.