Ensign Harcourt Lowther, of her Majesty’s 51st Light Infantry, sat staring out into his garden at Port Arthur, watching a couple of convict gardeners—who were going about their work with a monotonous and exasperating deliberation of movement—and lamenting the evil fortune that had stationed him in his present quarters. He had a great many troubles, this elegant young ensign, who was, for the time being, destined to bloom unseen, and waste the graces that ought to have adorned Belgravia upon the desert air of the island of Tasmania. He had, as he himself elegantly expressed it, no end of troubles. First and foremost, his cigar would not draw; and as it was the last of a case of choice cabanas, the calamity was not a small one. Secondly, there had been a drought in fair Van Diemen’s Land for the last month or so. The verdure was growing brown and leathery; the feathery masses of the tall fern shrivelled at the edges like scorched paper; the stiff foliage of the cedars seemed to rattle as it shook in the dry, dust-laden wind, and the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten in the shade; true, it might drop forty degrees or so at any moment, with the uprising of a moist breeze from the sea, but, pending the arrival of that auspicious moment, Mr Lowther was in a very bad temper. What had he done that he should be stationed in a convict settlement, with no chance of any gain or glory as compensation for his trials; with no one to speak to except a prosy old police-magistrate or a puritanical chaplain; with nothing better to look at than the eternal blue of the ocean, or a whaling vessel anchored in the bay; with nothing to listen to except the clanking of hammers and banging of timber and jingling of iron in the busy dockyard; with no better enjoyment to hope for than a couple of days’ quail-shooting or kangaroo-hunting in the interior?

“If I’d been Desperate Bill the Burglar, or Slippery Steeve the Smasher, I couldn’t be much worse off,” he muttered, as he gave up the unmanageable cigar, and went across the room to a table, upon which there were some tobacco-jars and meerschaum pipes. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, are those boots ready?”

This question was addressed to an invisible some one, whose low whistling of a jovial Irish air was audible from the adjoining room.

“Yes, captain,” answered a cheery voice—the whistler had broken off in the middle of the “wild sweet briery fence that around the flowers of Erin dwells,”—“yes, captain, quite ready.”

“That’s another aggravation,” exclaimed Mr. Lowther,—“the fellow will call me captain; as if it wasn’t an underhand way of reminding me that for a poor devil like me there’s no chance of promotion.”

“But you see you are captain here, Mr. Lowther,” said the whistler, emerging from the adjoining chamber with a pair of newly-blacked Wellingtons in his hand; “you’re captain, major, colonel, general, and field-marshal, all in one here, with seventy men under your control, and any amount of convicts to look after.”

“If there’s one thing in the world that’s more excruciating than another, it’s that fellow’s cheerfulness,” cried Mr. Lowther. I can fancy the feelings of an elegant young French marquis of the vieille roche, a scion of the Mortemars or Birons, buried alive in an underground cell in the Bastille, with a lively commoner for his companion—a cheerful bourgeois, who pretended to make light of his situation, and eat his mouldy bread with a relish. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, where are the boot-hooks? That fellow always forgets something.”

“That fellow,” otherwise Francis Tredethlyn, was a tall, stalwart private soldier, of some seven-and-twenty years of age, who had been honoured by an appointment to the post of valet and butler to Ensign Harcourt Lowther.

If the stalwart soldier had not been blest with one of those imperturbable Mark-Tapley-like tempers, which resemble the patent elliptic springs of a crack coachbuilder’s carriage, and can convey the traveller unjolted and uninjured over the roughest roads in the journey of life, he might have found his position as valet, major-domo, and occasional confidant to Harcourt Lowther, far from the pleasantest berth to be had in this great tempest-tossed vessel which we call the world. But Francis Tredethlyn’s serenity of disposition was proof against the most wearisome burden a man is ever called upon to bear—the companionship of a discontented fellow-creature, and all the variable moods, from a feverish cynical kind of gaiety to a dreary and ill-tempered gravity, which were engendered out of that perpetual discontent.

But Frank Tredethlyn bore it all cheerfully; with a manly, open-hearted cheerfulness that had no taint of sycophancy. If the young ensign wanted to talk to him, well and good—he was ready and willing to talk about any thing or every thing; but he had his own sentiments upon most subjects, which sentiments were of a very fast colour, and did not take any reflected hue from Mr. Lowther’s aristocratic opinions.

It is not to be supposed that Francis Tredethlyn, private soldier and valet, had any claims to intellectual equality with his master. The private wrote a fair commercial hand, very bold and big and resolute-looking; could read aloud without stumbling ignominiously over the long words; could cast up accounts; and, looking back at the history of the universal past, saw glimmering faintly over a sea of darkness and oblivion such beacon-lights as a Norman invasion; a solemn meeting on the flat turf of Runnymede; a Reformation, with a good deal of martyr-burning and head-chopping attendant thereupon; a fiery hook-nosed Dutch liberator, a Jacobite rebellion, and a Reform Bill. Beyond these limits the attainments of Mr. Tredethlyn did not extend; and the ensign, when grumbling at the general discomfort of his life, was apt to say that it was a hard thing to be flung for companionship on a fellow who was nothing but a boor and a clod.

Mr. Lowther treated his valet very much as a spoiled child treats her doll; sometimes it pleased him to be monstrously cordial and familiar with his attendant, while at another time he held Francis aloof by a haughty reserve of manner, beyond which barrier the other made no effort to penetrate.

“The fellow does possess that merit,” Harcourt Lowther said sometimes, “he knows how to keep his place.”

The fact of the matter is, the valet was infinitely less dependent upon his master’s companionship than his master upon his. There were a hundred ways in which Francis Tredethlyn could amuse himself; and there was not a cloud in the sky, a wave of the sea, a leaf in the garden, out of which he could not take some scrap of pleasure, and which had not a deeper and truer meaning for him than for the idle young officer who lay yawning upon his narrow couch with his feet in the air, and nothing better to do than to admire the shape of his boots, obtained on credit from a confiding West-end tradesman. Francis had that wide sympathy with his fellow-creatures which is a special attribute of some men; and was on the friendliest possible terms with the two convict gardeners, both of whom had achieved some renown as the most incorrigible and execrable specimens of the criminal class. Every dog in the little settlement fawned upon Frank Tredethlyn, and ran to rub his head against his knees, and slaver his hand with its flapping tongue. He had made a kennel for two or three of these canine acquaintances in a shady corner of the big garden, much to the disgust and annoyance of the ensign, who only cared for such dogs as are calculated to assist the sports of their lord and master. Staghounds and beagles, foxhounds and terriers, setters, pointers, and retrievers, clever ratting Scotch terriers, well-bred and savage bulls, even little short-eared toy terriers, or fawn-coloured and black-muzzled pugs, were all very well placed in the scheme of creation: but Mr. Lowther could find no explanation for the existence of those mongrel creatures who seem to have nothing to do in the world but to attach themselves with slavish devotion to some brutal master, or to lie in the most disreputable courts and alleys of a city in hot weather and catch flies.

But, somehow or other, Francis Tredethlyn seemed generally to do pretty much as he liked, in spite of military despotism and Mr. Harcourt Lowther. The dogs were unmolested in their shady corner; and the ensign was so good as to say that a little aviary of wicker-work and wire, which Tredethlyn constructed in his leisure hours, and duly filled with tiny feathered inhabitants, that kept up a faint twittering in the sunshine, was an improvement to the cottage. Francis was very handy, and could do wonders with a hammer and a handful of tin tacks; and was, indeed, altogether a great acquisition to his master, as Mr. Corbett, the police-magistrate, sometimes remarked to Harcourt Lowther.

“Yes,” Harcourt answered, indifferently, “the fellow is a cut above most of his class. He is a Cornishman, it seems, and the son of a small farmer in that land of Tre, Pol, and Pen; and he tells me that he has an old miser uncle who is supposed to be preternaturally rich. Egad! I wish I had such an uncle! All my uncles are misers for the matter of that; but then, unluckily, the poor devils are misers because they’re preternaturally poor.”

Mr. Lowther stood before the little looking-glass, in the sunny window, admiring himself, while Francis Tredethlyn helped him on with his coat. He was going to dine with Mr. Corbett the magistrate, and to spend the evening in the society of Miss Corbett, who had come out to the colony with the idea that general officers and wealthy judges would be waiting on the shore ready to conduct her from the place of debarcation to the hymeneal altar, and had been a little soured by the disenchantment which had too surely followed her arrival. She was a gushing damsel of thirty-five, very tall and square, and of a prevailing drab colour; and she played tremendous variations of shrill Scottish melodies on a piano which had been warranted to preserve its purity of tone in any climate, but upon which the nearest thing to an harmonious octave was a wild stretch of thirteen notes. Mr. Lowther must have been very low in the world when he had nothing better to do than to sit by Miss Corbett’s piano while she banged and rattled at the numerous disguises under which “Kinloch of Kinloch” appeared in a fantasia of twelve pages, now prancing jauntily in triplets, now rushing up and down the piano in chromatic scales, now scampering wildly in double arpeggios, now banging himself out of all knowledge in common chords, or wailing dismally in a hideous minor. Fate had done its worst for Ensign Lowther, when he had no better amusement than to lounge by the side of that ill-used old instrument, staring reflectively at the thin places on the top of Miss Corbett’s drab-coloured head.

Harcourt Lowther stood before the glass admiring his handsome face, while his valet brushed the collar of his coat. Well, he had a right to admire himself! If Providence had treated him badly, capricious Mother Nature, who, like any other frivolous-minded parent, elects her prime favourites without rhyme or reason, had been very bountiful to him in the matter of an aquiline nose, a finely-modelled mouth and chin, and deep womanish blue eyes, with a shimmer of gold on their lashes. No one could deny Mr. Lowther’s claim to be considered a remarkably handsome man, an elegant young man, a very agreeable and accomplished gentleman. The world, of course, had nothing to do with that rougher edge of the ensign’s character which he turned to his valet Francis Tredethlyn in his cottage at Port Arthur.

He went out presently, swinging his thin cane, and whistling all the triplets and cadences of an elaborate scena; he was an amateur musician and an amateur artist, playing more or less upon two or three different instruments, and painting more or less in half-a-dozen different styles. He could ride across country to the astonishment of burly Leicestershire squires, who were inclined to think contemptuously of his small waist and pretty blue eyes, his amber-tinted, jockey-club perfumed whiskers, trim tops, and unstained “pink.” He was a good shot, and long ago at Harrow had been renowned as a cricketer. He spoke three or four modern languages, and had that dim recollection of his classic studies which is sufficient for a man of the world who knows how to make much out of little. He was altogether a very accomplished gentleman; but with him intellectual pursuits were a means rather than an end, and he took very little pleasure in the society of books or bookmen. He wanted to be in the world, foremost in the perpetual strife, amid the crash of drums and trumpets, the roaring of cannon, and glitter of emblazoned standards flaunting gallantly in the wind. He wanted to be one of the conquerors in the universal tournament, and to ride up to the Queen of Beauty flushed and triumphant after the strife, to be admired and caressed. This is why the inaction of his present existence was so utterly intolerable to him. He had a supreme belief in himself, and in the indisputable nature of his right to the best and brightest amongst earth’s prizes. The time must be indeed out of joint in which there was nothing better for such as he than a dreary convict settlement in the island of Tasmania.

Unluckily, the time was out of joint. Robert Lowther, of Lowther Hall, Hampshire, had given his younger son an aristocratic name and a gentlemanly education; and then, having nothing more to bestow upon him, had been forced to leave the lad to fish for himself in the troubled waters of life. The prospects of the junior had always been more or less sacrificed to those of the senior of Robert Lowther’s two sons, and Harcourt bore a hearty grudge against his father and his brother on this account. Plainly told that he was to expect no more assistance from the parent purse, the young man had elected to become a barrister; but after a three years’ course of reading, in which the cultivation of light literature and modern languages was diversified by a slight sprinkling of legal study, he had grown heartily sick of his shabbily-furnished third floor in Hare Court, Temple, and had gladly accepted the price of a commission in one of Her Majesty’s light infantry regiments from an affectionate maiden aunt, believing that the regiment would be speedily under orders for India, where glory and loot no doubt awaited a dashing young soldier with a very high opinion of his own merits.

He went out now in very tolerable spirits; first, because he had worked himself into a good temper by grumbling to himself and Tredethlyn all day; secondly, because he was going to have a good dinner and some rare old tawny port, which was the boast of Mr. Corbett the magistrate; and thirdly, because he was going to be admired; and in a Tasmanian settlement even the worship of a young lady with bony fingers and drab-coloured eyes and hair is not altogether a despicable tribute.

“When I hear ‘Kinloch of Kinloch’ tortured out of all semblance of himself upon that wretched piano, I let myself go somehow or other,” thought the ensign, “and I fancy myself standing behind Maude Hillary’s Broadwood in the long drawing-room at Twickenham. Twickenham! Shall I ever see Twickenham again, and Maude Hillary, and the twinkling light upon the river, and the low branches of the chestnuts, the sedgy banks, the lazy boats, the lights up at the ‘Star and Garter’ glimmering across the dusky valley? Shall I ever see that fair civilised land again? or shall I die in this condemned and accursed hole?—die, forgotten and unlamented, before I have made any mark in the world?”

While Mr. Lowther went to eat his dinner with the hospitable magistrate, Francis Tredethlyn did his work briskly; folding his master’s coats and waistcoats, brushing boots, clearing away little heaps of cigar-ash, and picking up torn scraps of paper and open books cast recklessly upon the floor by a reader who was too badly disposed towards a world that had ill-treated him to find the opinions of any author entirely to his taste.

The soldier whistled that lively melody in praise of Erin’s daughters all the time, and achieved his task with the rapid neatness of a male Cinderella specially endowed by some fairy godmother; and when Mr. Lowther’s humble sitting-room and bed-room were restored to perfect order, his valet retired to his own little apartment, which was a shed-like chamber at the back of the cottage, and a kind of compromise between a dressing-room and a wash-house. Here Mr. Tredethlyn made his toilet, which consisted of a rapid plunge of his head and throat into a tub of cold water, some brisk operations with a cake of yellow soap, accompanied by sputtering and whizzing noises of an alarming character, a little fierce rubbing down with a coarse towel, and the smart application of a stiff and implacable-looking hair-brush. When this was done, Francis Tredethlyn put on his jacket, and went out into the garden to smoke his pipe and converse with the convicts.

Now that the gifts of nature had been enhanced by the adornments of art, the ensign’s valet was by no means a bad-looking fellow. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular in build as a modern Hercules. His closely cut black hair revealed the outline of a well-shaped head well placed upon his shoulders. Under his dark, almost gipsy-brown, skin was a rich crimson glow, which deepened or faded under the influence of any powerful emotion. His nose was straight, but rather short, and of no particular type; but a sculptor would have told you there was a special beauty about the curve of his full open nostrils, and Honoré de Balzac would have informed you that a man with that kind of nostril is generally good for something in this world. His forehead was low, stronger in the perceptive than in the reflective organs; his eyes were of a clear grey, darkened by the shadow of thick black lashes. He was a handsome soldier; he would have made a handsome gladiator in the old Roman days; a noble-looking brigand, in the days when brigands were chivalrous; a dashing highwayman, in the age when Claude Duval rode gaily to his death on Tyburn tree; a glorious sporting farmer down in Leicestershire to-day; but no power upon this earth could have transformed him into an elegant West-end lounger, an accomplished dawdler in fashionable drawing-rooms, or a “gentleman” in the modern acceptation of the word.

He went out into the garden now, to smoke his pipe of bird’s-eye and talk to the convict gardeners, who brightened at his approach, and deliberately planted themselves in a convenient position upon their spades, in order to converse with him. I am sorry to say that he was as much at home in their society as if they had been the most estimable of mankind, and that he encouraged them to talk freely of their burglarious experiences in the Old World. Was there not a smack of brigandage and adventure in these experiences, and even a dash of chivalry, according to the two men’s own showing? for they told stories of encounters in which they shone out quite with heroic lustre from their rooted objection to cut an elderly lady’s throat, and their gallant bearing towards a high-minded young damsel who had led them from room to room in her father’s mansion, and had pointed with her own fair hands to the whereabouts of the family valuables. Francis Tredethlyn sat upon the trunk of a fallen acacia, watching the lazy clouds in the still evening sky, and smoking his pipe, long after the two convicts had struck work and retired to their own quarters. He sat smoking and musing; thinking, as I suppose a man so banished must think, of that other far-away world which he had left behind him; and which it seemed to him sometimes, in such still moments as these, that he should never see again.

“So far away, so very far away!” he mused. “I wonder how the little village street upon the hill is looking now? It’s winter time now there, or getting towards winter time anyhow. I can fancy it of an evening, with the lights twinkling in the low shop windows, the big castle-gate frowning down upon the poor little street; the churchyard, where Susy and I have played, all dark and lonesome in the winter night; and Susy herself—pretty little dark-eyed Susy—sitting by the hearth in the big kitchen at Tredethlyn, stitch, stitch, stitch, while the old man nods and snores over his newspaper. Poor little Susy, what a hard life it is for her; and the old man as rich as that king of somewhere—Crœsus, don’t they call him?—if his neighbours are to be believed. Poor little Susy! is she fond of me, I wonder? and will she be pleased to marry me, if ever I’m able to go back, and say, ‘Susy, the best I could do, after running away and ’listing, was to save up money to buy my discharge, so that I might come home again to claim the old promise—for better for worse, for richer or poorer’? We couldn’t well be poorer than we should be just at first; for, of course, the old chap would turn rusty, and cut Susy off with a shilling; but who cares for that?” thought Francis Tredethlyn, snapping his fingers in the independence of his spirit. “If Susy loves me, and I love Susy, and we’re both young and strong and industrious, what’s to prevent us getting on in the world, without anybody’s money to help us?”

The soldier smoked another pipe in a dreamy reverie, in which his thoughts still hovered about one familiar spot in his native country—a long, low, stone-built farmhouse, standing alone upon a broad plateau of bare moorland, very dreary of aspect in winter,—a dismal, ghastly-looking homestead, in which the ornamental had been sacrificed to the useful,—a gaunt, naked-looking dwelling-place, upon whose decoration or improvement a ten-pound note had not been expended within the memory of man,—a house which had gone down through three generations of close-fisted, cross-grained owners, and which had grown uglier and drearier under the rule of each generation.

This was the habitation which stood as clearly out against the vague background of Francis Tredethlyn’s dreams as if it had been palpably present upon the rising ground on the other side of the bay. This was the house; and in the low narrow doorway, fronting the desolate expanse of stunted brown grass, the soldier saw the slender figure of a girl—a girl with dark, gentle eyes, and a quaker-like dress of coarse brown stuff,—a girl who stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking at the distant figure of an old man plodding homeward in the winter twilight. He had so often seen her thus, that it was only natural the picture of her should present itself to his mind to-night, as his thoughts wandered homeward. He was so far away from this girl and the familiar place in which she lived, that it seemed almost impossible to him that he could ever see her again, or tread the well-known pathways along which he had so often walked by her side. He thought of her almost as the dead may think of the living—if they do think of us.

“Poor little Susy! I wonder whether she loved me—whether she loves me still? I wasn’t like some of your lovers,—I wasn’t one of your desperate fellows. I had no hot fits, or cold fits, or jealous fits, or such like, and there are some folks that might say I was never in love at all. But I was very fond of Susy—poor little tender-hearted Susy! I used to think of her, somehow, as if she had been my little sister. I think of her like that now.”

It was late when Mr. Lowther came home from his friend the magistrate’s. The faint flush that lighted up his face, and the unwonted lustre of his eyes, bore testimony to the merits of Mr. Corbett’s tawny port. All Sandemann’s choicest vintages would not have tempted Harcourt Lowther to sit listening to a prosy old magistrate’s civil-service experiences, in Europe; but on this side of the world a bottle of good wine and a tolerably civilised companion were not entirely to be despised. The ensign was in a very good temper when he came into the little parlour, where a swinging lamp burned brightly, and where a tobacco-jar, a meerschaum, a case-bottle of Schiedam, a tumbler, and a jug of water, were set upon the table ready for the master of the domain. Mr. Lowther was in excellent temper, and inclined to be especially civil to his valet.

“No Schiedam to-night, Tredethlyn,” he said, throwing himself into the wicker easy-chair, and stretching his feet upon a smaller chair that stood opposite to him; “I’ve had a little too much of that old fellow’s port. Devilish good stuff it is too, if it hadn’t a tendency to spoil a man’s complexion, and concentrate itself in his nose. I’ll take a pipe, though. Just give me a light, will you, Tredethlyn?”

He sat in a lazy attitude, with his head thrown back against the rail of the chair, and daintily arranged the stray shreds of tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with the delicate tip of his little finger; while the private lighted a long strip of folded paper and handed it to his master.

“Oh, by the bye,” muttered Mr. Lowther, speaking with his mouth shut upon the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, “I’ve got some news for you, Tredethlyn. Just put your hand in my coat-pocket, and take out the paper you’ll find there. Goodness knows what it means,—a legacy of fifty pounds or so, I suppose. Anyhow, you’re a lucky devil. I should be glad enough to get even such a windfall as that; but I never hear of anything to my advantage.”

Francis Tredethlyn had taken the paper from his master’s pocket by this time; it was an old copy of the “Times;” and he presented it to the ensign, but the other pushed it away impatiently.

“I don’t want it,” he said; “I think I read every line of it while old Corbett was snoring after dinner. Look at the third advertisement in the second column of the Supplement.”

The soldier did as he was directed, and read the advertisement aloud very slowly and in a tone of unmitigated wonder.

“Francis Tredethlyn, nephew of the late Oliver Tredethlyn, of Tredethlyn Grange, near Landresdale, Cornwall. If the above-mentioned will apply to Messrs. Krusdale and Scardon, solicitors, 29, Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn, he will hear of something to his advantage.”

“The late Oliver Tredethlyn!” cried Francis, staring blankly at the paper; “my uncle’s dead, then!”

“Was he alive when you left England?” asked the ensign.

“He was alive when I left Cornwall. Dead! my uncle Oliver?” the young man said, in a dreamy voice; “and I pictured him to-night in my fancy, plodding home from the outlying lands, as hale and stern and sturdy as ever. Dead! and he may have been dead ever so long, for all this tells me,” added Francis Tredethlyn, pointing to the advertisement.

“You were uncommonly fond of your uncle, I suppose, from the way you talk of him,” Mr. Lowther remarked, carelessly. He was in good humour to-night, and ready to talk about anything,—inclined to take almost an interest in the affairs of another man, and that man his valet!

“Fond of him!” exclaimed Francis Tredethlyn, “fond of my uncle Oliver! I don’t think the creature ever lived that was fond of him, or whose love he’d have cared to have. He liked folks to obey him, and cut things as close as he wanted ’em cut; but beyond that, he didn’t care what they thought or what they did. I suppose he did love his daughter though, after a fashion, but it was a very hard fashion. No, sir, I wasn’t particularly fond of my uncle Oliver Tredethlyn, but I’m struck all of a heap by the news of his death coming upon me so sudden; and I’m thinking of the effect that it will have on my cousin Susy,—she’s all alone in the world now,—poor little Susy!”

The ensign looked up quickly. “Susy!” he said, “who the deuce is your cousin Susy?”

“Ah! How long ago did all that happen?”

“Nearly five years, sir.”

“And you’ve kept up some sort of a correspondence with your cousin since then, I suppose?”

“Not I, sir; her father wasn’t the man to let her write a letter that would cost a lump of money for postage, or to write any letter to such a scamp as me, either; and poor Susy was too close watched, and too obedient into the bargain, to write without his leave. I’ve written to her now and then, but I’ve had no news from home since the day I left it, except this that you’ve brought me to-night.”

“And I suppose your uncle has left you a legacy?”

“I suppose so, sir; it isn’t likely to be much anyhow, for I never was any great favourite of his.”

“Here, sir?”

“Yes, here.”

Francis Tredethlyn hesitated for a moment, but seeing that his master was resolute, he brought a clumsy old-fashioned mahogany desk from his chamber at the back of the cottage, and seated himself at a corner of the table with the desk before him. He had placed himself at a very respectful distance from Mr. Harcourt Lowther; but that gentleman, having finished his pipe, got up, and began to walk slowly up and down the room, while his valet squared his elbows and commenced a laborious inscription of his address at the top of the page.

“Tell them that you are Francis Tredethlyn, nephew of Oliver Tredethlyn, and that you can bring forward plenty of witnesses to prove your identity, and so on, as soon as you can get back to England. I don’t suppose they’ll let you have your legacy till they see you. Ask them to tell you what the amount is, at any rate.”

Mr. Lowther did not confine himself to giving his valet these hints upon the composition of his letter; he was good enough to stand behind the young man’s chair, and look over his shoulder as he wrote; but as Francis Tredethlyn’s penmanship was not of a very rapid order, the ensign’s eyes soon wandered from the page, and straying to an open division of the desk, lighted on something that looked like a water-coloured sketch, covered with silver paper.

“Why, you sly dog,” he cried with a laugh, “you’ve got a woman’s picture in your desk!”

Francis Tredethlyn blushed and looked very sheepish as he took the little water-coloured sketch out of its silver-paper envelope and handed it submissively to his master.

“It’s my cousin Susan’s portrait, sir,” he said; “it was taken by a travelling artist, who came down our way one summer. It isn’t much of a likeness, but it pleases me to look at it sometimes, for I can fill up all that’s wanting in the face out of my own mind, and see my cousin smiling at me, as if I was at home again.”

Mr. Lowther stood behind his servant’s chair looking at the portrait, while the soldier went on writing. It was not the work of a very brilliant artist; there was none of those deliciously careless touches, none of that transparent lightness, which a clever painter’s manipulation would have displayed. It was a stiff, laborious little portrait of a girl with hazel brown eyes and smooth banded brown hair, and an innocent childish mouth, rosy and fresh and smiling as a summer’s morning in the country. It was only the picture of a country girl, who seemed to have looked shyly at the artist as he painted her.

“So that’s your cousin Susy,” said Mr. Lowther, laying the picture down upon the table by Tredethlyn’s elbow. “I shan’t stop while you address your letter, and I don’t want any thing more, so you can go to bed at once if you like. Good night.”

The ensign took a candle from a little side-table as he spoke, lighted it at the lamp above Tredethlyn’s head, and went out of the room. Francis finished his letter, and placed it on the mantelpiece, where some letters of his master’s were lying ready for the next day’s mail. He did not go to bed at once, though it was late, and he was free to do so, but sat for some time with his cousin Susan Tredethlyn’s portrait in his hand, looking at the girlish face, and thinking of the changes that had come to pass in his old home.

“The old chap was hard and stern with her, and her life was a dull one, poor little girl,” thought the soldier; “and she’ll have a fine fortune, I suppose, now he’s gone; but somehow I don’t like to think of her left lonely in the world; she’s too young and too pretty, and too innocent for that. Innocent! why, bless her poor tender little heart, I don’t think she knows there’s such a thing as wickedness upon this earth.”