“He informed me that her brother, another Joseph Wyvil and a cousin of the prisoner, had come and taken her away, and it was reported that he had taken her to America.
“This was all my old neighbor had to tell me. And soon after, the fortunes of war—in the mines—separated us, he going farther up the country.
“We never met again.
“About two years ago my health began to fail. I was attacked with this disease of the lungs that had carried off both my parents before they had reached their fortieth year (consumptives ought never to marry—each other, anyway). I knew I did not need the doctor to tell me the truth, and so I did not tempt him to tell me a pious, professional lie. I knew by family experience that I was booked for the last journey, and just about how long it might be.
“I was seized with a homesick longing to see once more the English village in which I was born and brought up, and where my old friends lived, if any remained.
“So, about eighteen months ago, I sailed for England in one of the fast-sailing ocean steamers. And when we landed in Liverpool I took the first express train for Carlisle, got out at the Stockbridge station and took the same coach, or one exactly like the same coach, that I and my reckless companions had helped to wreck, that fatal 13th of November, seventeen years before. I went over the same road at the same hour, and put up at the Tawny Lion, where the coach stopped, and where we, reckless young roughs, had laid the plan to recover the wicked will which had ended in such a tragedy.
“But, oh! the changes in seventeen years! The Tawny Lion had passed into strangers’ hands. Very few of my old friends were left. I went to see the young squire at Hawkhurst. Quite a middle-aged squire now, a sedate magistrate and sub-lieutenant of the county; married and surrounded by a large family of sons and daughters. He was very glad to see me, although he could never have suspected that it was to my hand he owed the destruction of that will which left him to inherit his own, as next of kin and heir-at-law.
“I did not stay at Orton long. I went up to London; and there, as you know, I was soon arrested for forgery, tried, convicted, and sentenced to penal servitude.
“But, gentlemen, as I maintained during my trial, I maintain here, on my death-bed, I never committed that forgery. What call had I to forge a check for a miserable five-pound note, when I had a plenty of money made in the mines?
“No; as I told the judge and jury—though they would not believe me—I now tell you with my parting breath, I cashed that check to accommodate a gentleman who was a guest in the same hotel with myself. I gave him five sovereigns for his forged check, not suspecting it to be forged, and in a day or two after presented it at the bank for payment, and was nabbed.