He walked in, and hung up his hat in the hall, just as if he had come in from a walk.  Not finding the old man, he went into Mark Armsworth’s, frightening out of her wits a pale, ugly girl of seventeen, whom he discovered to be his old playfellow, Mary.  However, she soon recovered her equanimity, and longed to throw her arms round his neck as of old, and was only restrained by the thought that she was grown a great girl now.  She called her father, and all the household, and after a while the old doctor came home, and the fatted calf was killed, and all made merry over the return of this altogether unrepentant prodigal son.

Tom Thurnall stayed a month at home, and then went to America, whence he wrote home in about six months.  Then came a long silence, and then a letter from California; and then letters more regularly from Australia.  Sickened with California life, he had crossed the Pacific once more, and was hard at work in the diggings, doctoring and gold-finding by turns.

“A rolling stone gathers no moss,” said his father.

“He has the pluck of a hound, and the cunning of a fox,” said Mark, “and he’ll be a credit to you yet.”

So the years slipped on till the autumn of 1853.  And then Tom, at the diggings at Ballarat, got a letter from Mary Armsworth.

“Your father is quite well in health, but his eyes have grown much worse, and the doctors are afraid that he has little chance of recovering the sight, at least of the left eye.  And something has happened to the railroad in which he had invested so much, and he has given up the old house.  He wants you to come home; but my father has entreated him to let you stay.  You know, while we are here, he is safe.”

Tom walked away slowly into the forest.  He felt that the crisis of his life was come.

“I’ll stay here and work,” he said to himself finally, “till I make a hit or luck runs dry, and then home and settle; and, meanwhile, I’ll go down to Melbourne tomorrow, and send the dear old dad two hundred pounds.”

And there sprang up in him at once the intensest yearning after his father and the haunts of his boyhood, and the wildest dread that he should never see them.

II.—­The Wreck

Half the village of Aberalva is collected on the long sloping point of a cliff.  Sailors wrapped in pilot-cloth, oil-skinned coast guardsmen, women with their gowns turned over their heads, while every moment some fresh comer stumbles down the slope and asks, “Where’s the wreck?” A shift of wind, a drift of cloud, and the moon flashes out a moment.

“There she is, sir,” says Brown, the head-boatman to the coastguard lieutenant.

Some three hundred yards out at sea lies a long, curved, black line, amid the white, wild leaping hills of water.  A murmur from the crowd.

“A Liverpool clipper, by the lines of her.”

“God help the poor passengers, then!” sobs a woman.  “They’re past our help.”