HIS NATURAL LIFE.

PROLOGUE.

On the evening of May 3, 1827, the garden of a large red-brick
bow-windowed mansion called North End House, which, enclosed in spacious
grounds, stands on the eastern height of Hampstead Heath, between Finchley Road
and the Chestnut Avenue, was the scene of a domestic tragedy.

Three persons were the actors in it. One was an old man, whose white hair
and wrinkled face gave token that he was at least sixty years of age.
He stood erect with his back to the wall, which separates the garden
from the Heath, in the attitude of one surprised into sudden passion,
and held uplifted the heavy ebony cane upon which he was ordinarily accustomed
to lean. He was confronted by a man of two-and-twenty, unusually tall
and athletic of figure, dresses in rough seafaring clothes,
and who held in his arms, protecting her, a lady of middle age.
The face of the young man wore an expression of horror-stricken astonishment,
and the slight frame of the grey-haired woman was convulsed with sobs.

These three people were Sir Richard Devine, his wife, and his only son Richard,
who had returned from abroad that morning.

"So, madam," said Sir Richard, in the high-strung accents which
in crises of great mental agony are common to the most self-restrained of us,
"you have been for twenty years a living lie! For twenty years
you have cheated and mocked me. For twenty years--in company with a scoundrel
whose name is a byword for all that is profligate and base--you have