Then he waited for full ten minutes, which, of course, seemed to him to be very much more than an hour.  At last the door was opened and Mrs. Bolton appeared.  The reader is not to suppose that she was an ugly, cross-looking old woman.  She was neither ugly, nor old, nor cross.  When she had married Mr. Bolton, she had been quite young, and now she was not much past forty.  And she was handsome too, with a fine oval face which suited well with the peculiar simplicity of her dress and the sober seriousness of her gait and manner.  It might, perhaps, be said of her that she tried to look old and ugly,—­and cross too, but that she did not succeed.  She now greeted her visitor very coldly, and having asked after old Mr. Caldigate, sat silent looking at John Caldigate as though there were nothing more possible for her to say.

’I could not but come to see you and thank you for your kindness before I went,’ said John.

’I remember your coming about some business.  We have very few visitors here.’

‘I went out, you know, as a miner.’

‘I think I heard Mr. Bolton say so.’

‘And I have succeeded very well.’

‘Oh, indeed!’

’So well that I have been able to come back; and though I may perhaps be obliged to revisit the colony to settle my affairs there, I am going to live here at home.’

‘I hope that will be comfortable to you.’  At every word she spoke, her voice took more and more plainly that tone of wonder which we are all of us apt to express when called on to speak on matters which we are at the moment astonished to have introduced to us.

’Yes; Mrs. Bolton, I hope it will.  And now I have got something particular to say.’

‘Perhaps you had better see—­Mr. Bolton—­at the bank.’

’I hope I may be able to do so.  I quite intend it.  But as I am here, if you will allow me, I will say a word to you first.  In all matters there is nothing so good as being explicit.’  She looked at him as though she was altogether afraid of him.  And indeed she was.  Her husband’s opinion of the young man had been very bad five years ago,—­and she had not heard that it had been altered since.  Young men who went out to the colonies because they were ruined, were, to her thinking, the worst among the bad,—­men who drank and gambled and indulged in strange lives, mere castaways, the adopted of Satan.  And, to her thinking, among men, none were so rough as miners,—­and among miners none were so godless, so unrestrained so wild as the seekers after gold.  She had read, perhaps, something of the Spaniards in Central America, and regarded such adventurers as she would pirates and freebooters generally.  And then with regard to the Caldigates generally,—­the elder of whom she knew to have been one of her husband’s intimate friends in his less regenerated days,—­she believed them to be infidel freethinkers.  She was not, therefore, by any means predisposed in favour