great interest made for Ambrose and Eustace, and in consideration of
their early youth (they were not twenty-two) their sentence was
commuted to transportation for life, and so was Prometesky's, because
he was half a foreigner, and because he was proved to have saved
life.

My father would not see them again, but he offered their wives a
passage out to join them, and wanted to have had their two babies
left with him, but the two young women refused to part with them; and
it was after that that he married again, meaning to cast them off for
ever, though, as long as their time of servitude lasted, he sent the
wives an allowance, and as soon as his sons could hold property, he
gave them a handsome sum with which to set themselves up in a large
farm in the Bush.

And when little Percy died, he wanted again to have his eldest
grandson sent home to him, and was very much wounded by the refusal
which came only just before his death. His will had left the estate
to the grandson, as the right heir. Everyone looked on it as a bad
prospect, but no one thought of the "convict boy" as in the immediate
future, as my mother was still quite a young woman.

But when I was just three-and-twenty, an attack of diphtheria broke
out; my mother and I both caught it; and, alas! I alone recovered.
The illness was very long with me, partly from my desolateness and
grief, for, tender as my kind old servants were, and good as were my
friends and neighbours, they could only make me feel what they were
_not_.

Our old lawyer, Mr. Prosser, had written to my nephew, for we knew