The whole thing was begun and ended so swiftly that this very grandiloquent and self-important quill-pen hath made, I find, an incomparably greater business of it than ever it was in itself. It can never bring its dignity down to the subordinate office of the relation of a plain piece of history, but is all for the frills and the trimmings. Do not be deceived into thinking, therefore, that this country brawl was as great as the battle of Marathon. But at least, at the time the consequences were to me very poignant. As we were dragged along over the stubble and through the moonlight, we knew not whither, I was more stunned by my evil fortune than by the blow I had come by in the argument, notwithstanding that as I walked the blood trickled in a thin warm stream on to my coat. For a person in my circumstances to fall into the hands of the law in a hedge scuffle in an alien quarrel, was about as scurvy an accident as could possibly happen. I was truly between the devil and the deep sea. To clear myself of the charge of being a gypsy and a sheep-stealer, I should be compelled to expose my identity, and in doing so should but fall out of the frying-pan into the fire. There was another side to the matter, equally black. Whatever would happen to Cynthia? Was she not left utterly destitute, without a friend, in a foreign country? Even in the extreme unlikelihood of my regaining my freedom, neither of us would know where to seek the other, and thus at a time when it was so imperative that we should be together, we should be wrenched apart. Look at the case as I might, I could derive no crumb of comfort from it. It was in a great depression of spirit then that I was haled, weak, bleeding, and encumbered along the country lanes to meet my fate. What it was likely to be I did not exactly know, but look at the matter how I would, there seemed to be but one natural ending to it. I was parted from my poor little wife, doubtless for ever; and if I did not come to the gallows for murder or stealing sheep, I must perforce end my days in a debtor's prison. CHAPTER XI I COME A PRISONER TO A FAMILIAR HOUSE, AND FIND STRANGE COMPANY We had marched along for what seemed to me in my unhappy state an intolerable period, although I suppose actually the time was less than an hour, when we passed through the gates of a great house. When the porter came out of his lodge to let us through, and held his lantern against the iron-work, I observed that the device of the family wrought therein had a strangely familiar appearance. There was something about the porter too that awoke all sorts of remote recollections in my mind. As we went along the paths, even the situation of the trees that skirted them added to this impression. And when we came at last on to the lawn, and the house itself was clearly exposed in the moonlight, a cry of surprise almost escaped my lips, for the place had once been my own.