None of this came to the knowledge of his wife, as how should it? He wrote no news of it to her, and their relation was known to very few. Moreover, the burglary was in Bristol and Polly was at a farmhouse in Lincolnshire, awaiting a birth which only added another grief to her life, for her child was born dead. She recovered from a long illness which swallowed up the remains of the money her husband had given her, to find herself destitute and minus most of the good looks which had obtained for her her previous situation. She succeeded thereafter in maintaining herself by needlework--she was an adept in that--and so avoided becoming an incumbrance on her family, which she could no longer help now as she had done in her prosperity. But of her worthless husband's fate she never knew anything, the trial having taken place during an illness which nearly ended all her miseries for her. By the time she was on the way to recovery it would have been difficult to trace her husband, even had she had any motive for doing so. As for him--a convict and the son of a convict--his period of detention in the hulks on the Thames was followed by the usual voyage to the Antipodes; but this time the vessel into which he was transhipped at Sydney sailed for Norfolk Island, not Hobart Town nor Macquarie Harbour. Maisie's son was not destined to revisit the land of his birth. The early deliverance from actual bondage to a condition free in all but the name, which had led to his father's successful later career, was impossible in an island half the size of the Isle of Wight, and the man grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the loveliest islands in the Pacific. After his departure his mother may have been influenced by a wish to obliterate her whole past, and this wish may have been the cause of her adoption of a name not her own. Some lingering reluctance to make her severance from her own belongings absolute may have dictated the choice of the name of Prichard, which was that of an old nurse of her childhood, who had stood by her mother's dying bed. It would serve every reasonable purpose of disguise without grating on memories of bygone times. A shred of identity was left to cling to. It is less clear why the quasi-daughter whom she had never seen should have repudiated her married name. Polly was under no obligation not to call herself Mrs. Daverill, unless it were compliance with her promise to keep the marriage secret. She, however, acquiesced in the Mrs., and supplied a name as a passport to a respectable widowhood. But she did not dress the part very vigorously, and report soon accepted the husband as a bad lot and a riddance. Nothing very uncommon in that! CHAPTER VII