They had spent those ten years in freedom and good repute , under God 's blue sky , in His glad air and sunshine . He , John Churchill , had spent them behind the walls of a prison . His close-clipped hair was grey ; his figure , encased in an ill-fitting suit of coarse cloth , was stooped and shrunken ; his face was deeply lined ; yet he was not an old man in years . He was only forty ; he was thirty when he had been convicted of embezzling the bank funds for purposes of speculation and had been sent to prison , leaving behind a wife and father who were broken-hearted and a sister whose pride had suffered more than her heart . He had never seen them since , but he knew what had happened in his absence . His wife had died two months later , leaving behind her a baby boy ; his father had died within the year . He had killed them ; he , John Churchill , who loved them , had killed them as surely as though his hand had struck them down in cold blood . His sister had taken the baby , his little son whom he had never seen , but for whom he had prepared such a birthright of dishonour . She had never forgiven her brother and she never wrote to him . He knew that she would have brought the boy up either in ignorance of his father 's crime or in utter detestation of it . When he came back to the world after his imprisonment , there was not a single friendly hand to clasp his and help him struggle up again . The best his friends had been able to do for him was to forget him . He was filled with bitterness and despair and a gnawing hatred of the world of brightness around him . He had no place in it ; he was an ugly blot on it . He was a friendless , wifeless , homeless man who could not so much as look his fellow men in the face , who must henceforth consort with outcasts . In his extremity he hated God and man , burning with futile resentment against both . Only one feeling of tenderness yet remained in his heart ; it centred around the thought of his little son . When he left the prison he had made up his mind what to do . He had a little money which his father had left him , enough to take him west . He would go there , under a new name .
There would be novelty and adventure to blot out the memories of the old XXXXX .
Churchill God birthright dishonour hair left mind money son years