“Let us consider the case without prejudice:  Here is a young man—­a gambler, a wastrel—­with pressing debts, and clamoring creditors threatening what might be considered dishonor.  Within reach of this young man’s hand are certain very valuable properties which he might even consider his own, since they would in time descend to him.  His mother’s resources are exhausted, his father’s heart steeled against further advancements.  Cause and effect, you see—­debts:  missing jewels.

“The case not only formed two factions in public opinion; it split the Hynds family itself.  His two sisters, and his cousin Jessamine, raised in this house, believed him guilty.  His mother and his wife believed in his innocence and refused to hear a word against him.  These two things only did Richard Hynds salvage in that utter wreck and catastrophe—­his mother’s faith and his wife’s love.

“He lost his father’s.  This was a man, who, under his pleasant exterior of a landed gentleman, was rigid and inflexible.  He had already borne a great deal, remember; but this was disgrace, an indelible stain upon a stainless name.  Therefore this father, who was at the same time a just and good man, disinherited his favorite child and eldest son.  House, slaves, lands, money, the great position of the head of a powerful family, came to Freeman Hynds, my late client’s father, born five years later than his brother, on the twentieth day of September, 1785—­a long time ago! a long time ago!

“Richard was disgraced, and a beggar.  And it seemed that the rod that had lain in pickle for the Hyndses for their pride, was brought forth to scourge them all.  For Richard, desperate, distracted, careless of what happened to him, rode out one day through a pelting rain.  Result, congested lungs; the poor wastrel, who had no wish to live, was soon satisfactorily dead.

“When James Hampden got that news, he rose up from his chair, laid the book he had been reading—­it was Baxter’s ’Saint’s Rest’—­down on the library table and fell as if lightning had struck him.  Apoplexy, it was said; a thrust through the heart, I should call it.  Richard the sinner was none the less Richard his first-born.

“Hard upon the heels of these two disasters came a third, the case of Jessamine Hynds.  This Jessamine—­a highly gifted, imperious creature, proud as Lucifer, after the manner of the Hyndses—­was an orphan, reared in Hynds House.  She was some several years older than her cousins, to whom she was greatly attached.  The trouble so preyed upon her that she became melancholy, and one fine day disappeared and was never afterward found.  There was great hue and cry made for her, and men riding hither and yon, for this was a Hynds woman, and her story touched popular imagination, so that she is supposed,” said the lawyer dryly, “to wander around Hynds House o’ nights, crying for Richard and searching for the lost jewels.