uffer such abasement and
disgrace seemed incomprehensible to him; the injustice of it appeared to
him so rank, so colossal, as to destroy within him, in a moment, every
atom of his former faith in the existence of a God of justice and of
mercy! And with his loss of faith in God went his faith in man. Every
good instinct at once seemed to die within him; while as for life,
henceforth it could be to him only an intolerable burden to be laid down
at the first convenient opportunity.

Feeling thus, as he did, full of rebellion against fate, full of anger
and resentment against his fellow-man for the bitterly cruel injustice
that had been meted out to him, and kicking hard against the pricks
generally, it was scarcely to be expected that he would prove very
amenable to the harsh discipline of prison life; and as a matter of fact
he did not; he was very careful to avoid the committal of any offence
sufficiently serious to bring down upon him the disgrace of a flogging--
that crowning shame he could not have endured and continued to live--
but, short of that, he was so careless and intractable a prisoner, and
gave so much trouble and annoyance to the warders in charge of him, that
he earned none of those good marks whereby a prisoner can purchase the
remission of a certain proportion of his sentence; and as a result he
served the full term of his imprisonment, every moment of which seemed
crowded with the tortures of hell! And when at length he emerged once
more into the world, he did so as a thoroughly soured, embittered,
cynical, utterly hopeless and reckless man, without a shred of faith in
anything that was good.

The first thing that he learned, upon attaining his freedom, was that
although the Earl, his father, had, after all, survived the shock of his
son's disgrace, he had made a solemn vow never to forgive him, never to
see him again, and never to have any communication with him. He had,
however, made arrangements with his solicitors that his son should be
met at the prison gates and conveyed thence to London, where he was
lodged in a quiet hotel until arrangements could be made for his
shipment off to Australia. This was quickly done; and within a week of
his release the young man, under the assumed name of Richard Leslie,
found himself a saloon passenger on board the _Golden Fleece_, with a
plain but sufficient outfit for the voyage, and one hundred pounds in
his pocket to enable him to make a new start in lif