he then supreme
authority at Macquarie Harbour. This got him almost on his arrival a
ticket-of-leave, by virtue of which he was free within the island during
good behaviour. He soon contrived, by his superior education and
manners, to get a foothold in a rough community, and saw his way to
rising in the world, even to prosperity. In a very short time, said a
later letter, he would save enough to pay Maisie's passage out, and then
she could join him. The only redeeming trait the story shows of this man
is his strange confidence that this girl, whom he had cruelly betrayed,
would face all the terrors of a three-months' sea-voyage and travel,
alone in a strange land, to become the slave and helpless dependent of a
convict on ticket-of-leave.

She had returned to her father's house a year after the trial, her
sister having threatened to leave it unless her father permitted her to
do so, taking with her her two children; a very delicate little boy,
born in the first year of her marriage, and a girl baby only four months
old, which had come into the world eight months after its wretched
parent's conviction. During this life at her father's the little boy
died. He had been christened, after his father and uncle, Phoebe's
rejected suitor--Ralph Thornton Daverill. The little girl she had
baptized by the name of Ruth. This little Ruth she took with her, when,
on Phoebe's marriage two years later, she went to live at the house of
the new-married couple; and one would have said that the twins lived in
even closer union than before, and that nothing could part them again.

It would have been a mistake. Within three years Maisie received a
letter enclosing a draft on a London bank for more than her
passage-money, naming an agent who would arrange for her in everything,
and ending with a postscript:--"Come out at once." Shortly after, no
change having been noticeable in her deportment, except, perhaps, an
increased tenderness to her child and her sister, she vanished suddenly;
leaving only a letter to Phoebe, full of contrition for her behaviour,
but saying that her first duty was towards her husband. She had not
dared to take with her her child, and it had been a bitter grief to her
to forsake it, but she knew well that it would have been as great a
bitterness to Phoebe to lose it, as she was herself childless at the
time; and, indeed, her only consolation was that Phoebe would still
continue to be, as it were, a second mother to "t