“What is the sentence?” is asked by a hundred voices.

The answer is “Transportation for Life.”

But there was one standing aloof on the hill, whose inquiring eye wandered over the crowd with indescribable anguish, whose pallid cheek grew more and more ghastly at every denunciation of the culprit, and who, when at last the sentence was pronounced, fell insensible upon the green-sward.  It was the burglar’s son.

When the boy recovered from his swoon, it was late in the afternoon; he was alone; the faint tinkling of the sheep-bell had again replaced the sound of the human chorus of expectation, and dread, and jesting; all was peaceful, he could not understand why he lay there, feeling so weak and sick.  He raised himself tremulously and looked around, the turf was cut and spoilt by the trampling of many feet.  All his life of the last few months floated before his memory, his residence in his father’s hovel with ruffianly comrades, the desperate schemes he heard as he pretended to sleep on his lowly bed, their expeditions at night, masked and armed, their hasty returns, the news of his father’s capture, his own removal to the house of some female in the town, the court, the trial, the condemnation.

The father had been a harsh and brutal parent, but he had not positively ill-used his boy.  Of the Great and Merciful Father of the fatherless the child knew nothing.  He deemed himself alone in the world.  Yet grief was not his pervading feeling, nor the shame, of being known as the son of a transport.  It was revenge which burned within him.  He thought of the crowd which had come to feast upon his father’s agony; he longed to tear them to pieces, and he plucked savagely a handful of the grass on which he leant.  Oh, that he were a man! that he could punish them all—­all,—­the spectators first the constables, the judge, the jury, the witnesses,—­one of them especially, a clergyman named Leyton, who had given his evidence more positively, more clearly, than all the others.  Oh, that he could do that man some injury,—­but for him his father would not have been identified and convicted.

Suddenly a thought occurred to him,—­his eyes sparkled with fierce delight.  “I know where he lives,” he said to himself; “he has the farm and parsonage of Millwood.  I will go there at once,—­it is almost dark already.  I will do as I have heard father say he once did to the Squire.  I will set his barns and his house on fire.  Yes, yes, he shall burn for it,—­he shall get no more fathers transported.”

To procure a box of matches was an easy task, and that was all the preparation the boy made.

The autumn was far advanced.  A cold wind was beginning to moan amongst the almost leafless trees, and George West’s teeth chattered, and his ill-clad limbs grew numb as he walked along the fields leading to Millwood.  “Lucky it’s a dark night; this fine wind will fan the flame nicely,” he repeated to himself.