He discovered that his preserver was his own father, Tom Gatliffe, who, the reader will remember, had come upon the scene just in time to save his son. When the fact was clearly established the Earl was almost frantic.
Lady Batershall, Lady Marvlynn, and a host of other persons were in close attendance on the sufferer, who, despite skill and unremitting attention, breathed his last in the ward of a metropolitan hospital.
But very little now remains to be told. Mr. Kensett at his decease left all his worldly wealth to him whom we have known as Alf Parvis, who squandered his patrimony as he had heretofore squandered his ill-gotten gains, and died in poverty and wretchedness while yet in the springtime of his life.
Our story hath a mournful ending, but we trust that those who have perused these pages have yet been able to derive entertainment and instruction from the many noteworthy facts contained therein. One fact has been clearly established—
“A life of crime is always a life of sorrow and care, for the hearts of the guilty tremble for the past, for the present, and the future.”
THE END.
Transcriber’s Note:
Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the end of the chapter in which related anchors occur. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, transposed or partially printed letters, were corrected. Except for transcriptions of Peace’s letters, final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added. Duplicate words and syllables at line endings or page breaks were removed. Where unprinted or illegible words could not be discerned, an elipsis was inserted. Typesetting vagaries and use of quotation marks have been standardized for ease of reading. One mid-sentence paragraph break was removed, and several paragraph breaks were added between change of speakers.
Names of some people and places have multiple spellings. Dialect, obsolete words and misspellings were left unchanged. Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed. Occasional words omitted in the text were not inserted. There is no CHAPTER XXII and there are two CHAPTER CV. Unprinted III was added to CHAPTER XXXVIII; CHAPTER XXCII was changed to CXXII; and CHAPTERX was changed to CHAPTER. There are several numbers mistyped in the table of Pence’s cypher.