The barrister’s manner was far more quiet and subdued than it was when we first made his acquaintance. All that cynicism and apparent infidelity had dropped bodily as it were out of his conversation. He was evidently quietly resigned to his lot, calmly resolved to live out the end of his days uncomplainingly. He had succeeded to a certain extent in his somewhat romantic and almost hopeless resolves to reform his miserable daughter. He did not tell Bales how and by what degrees he had worked upon her darkened mind; he said nothing of the days of patient and unflagging effort to instruct her, to excite her higher sensibilities, to animate her with a true love for the beautiful and sublime, and through the medium of nature and art to bring her to a knowledge of the divine blessings of the Christian faith and hope. It was a plain unvarnished story which the barrister told his friend the detective. Whatever may have been the result of the father’s endeavour to change the perverted nature of his singularly-discovered child, her career was at an end--she died of a fever in a French convent, where the barrister had placed her, by her own desire; and Mr. Williamson had left France only the day before the detective met him after the burial of his daughter, upon whose tomb he had inscribed those words of the second commandment, which he had written down in that memorable epistle to Paul Somerton. The detective told Williamson all about the stirring occurrences which had taken place during his absence, and the barrister resolved that he would convert what stock and property he had into money, and join Lieutenant Somerton in the Cape, at any rate for a time. “I shall travel about the world and occupy myself with the manners and customs of other lands,” said the barrister, “and write sketches of travel for some of my publishing friends in town. If I could put my own trials into a book, and make capital out of my own troubles, I might perpetrate a novel, Bales.” “It would be very taking,” said Bales; “I have been asked, sir, by a gentleman that writes for the _Pyrotechnic_, to let him do my autobiography, with all the cases I have been mixed up in; but I don’t think I shall.” They chatted together for some hours in the familiar room, and we leave them enveloped in clouds of smoke through which the candles burn as dimly as the barrister’s future hopes; we leave them to carry our readers to the Brazencrook county gaol, where there are three prisoners in whom we have an interest.