but overwhelmed in debt.

"In the first moment of horror I bitterly upbraided my wife. She, poor
thing, took her misfortunes and my anger so much to heart that she fell
into a consumption, and died in less than a year. I was so affected by
my troubles--more, I believe, for the loss of my wife, whom I really
loved, than for the loss of my income--that I fell for a time into a
despondent frame of mind. I had felt compelled to retire from my
profession--a man in a state of debt and bankruptcy had no right to be
holding a royal commission--and my enforced idleness did not help to
mend matters. At length life, health, and youth--I was not yet
thirty--asserted themselves. Melancholy flew away; energy, a wish to be
up and doing something, returned.

"I looked around me. The prospect was a sad one. There was nothing to be
done. No one wanted me.

"At length fortune, tired of frowning upon me, smiled awhile. I fell in
with an old friend of my father's, a wealthy coffee-planter in Ceylon.
He had come over for a holiday to his native country. For the father's
sake, for the sake of old times and the days of his youth, he was kind
to the son. He sympathised with my sorrows, which were not of my own
making. About to return to Ceylon, he offered me a certain partnership
in his business, promising greater things if I remained.

"How thankfully I turned my back upon Spain, the land of all my
misfortunes, I could never say. I began a new and prosperous life in a
new country. In course of time my old friend died, and I became senior
partner in a flourishing concern. For twenty-five years I remained out
in Ceylon. I had made a considerable fortune, and you will think that I
had probably married again. No, senor. I gave up my life to work, and
would not a second time tempt fate.

"At last, after an absence of a quarter of a century, a feeling crept
over me that had every symptom of _mal du pays_. As this increased, I
realised my possessions and returned to my own country, a rich man. But,
alas! youth had fled. Wealth did not now mean for me what it had meant
at five-and-twenty. The first thing I did was to pay up all my debts
with interest, and to stand a free, honourable and honoured man. What
surprised me most was the comparative smallness of the sum which in the
hour of our misfortunes I had thought so formidable.

"And now, senor, do you think that I could let well alone: or, rather,
that fortune could still turn to me a smiling