the ladies of the family certainly not oftener than once a year.  Very little was said in answer to any of John’s inquiries.  ’Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Bolton are, I believe, quite well.’  So much was declared in one of the old squire’s letters; and even that little served to make known that at any rate, so far, no tidings as to marriage on the part of Hester had reached the ear of her father’s old friend.  Perhaps this was all that John Caldigate wanted to learn.

At last there came word that John intended to come home with the next month’s mail.  This letter arrived about midsummer, when the miner had been absent three years and a half.  He had not settled all his affairs so completely but that it might be necessary that he should return; but he thought that he would be able to remain at least twelve months in England.  And in England he intended to make his home.  Gold, he said, was certainly very attractive; but he did not like New South Wales as a country in which to live.  He had now contracted his ventures to the one enterprise of the Polyeuka mine, from which he was receiving large monthly dividends.  If that went on prosperously, perhaps he need not return to the colony at all.  ‘Poor Dick Shand!’ he said.  ’He is a shepherd far away in the west, hardly earning better wages than an English ploughman, and I am coming home with a pocket full of money!  A few glasses of whisky have made all the difference!’

The squire when he received this felt more of exultation than he had ever known in his life.  It seemed as though something of those throbbings of delight which are common to most of us when we are young, had come to him for the first time in his old age.  He could not bring himself to care in the least for Dick Shand.  At last,—­at last,—­he was going to have near him a companion that he could love.

‘Well, yes; I suppose he has put together a little money,’ he said to Farmer Holt, when that worthy tenant asked enthusiastically as to the truth of the rumours which were spread about as to the young squire’s success.  ’I rather think he’ll settle down and live in the old place after all.’

‘That’s what he ought to do, squoire—­that’s what he ought to do,’ said Mr. Holt, almost choked by the energy of his own utterances.

Chapter XIV

Again at Home

On his arrival in England John Caldigate went instantly down to Folking.  He had come back quite fortified in his resolution of making Hester Bolton his wife, if he should find Hester Bolton willing and if she should have grown at all into that form and manner, into those ways of look, of speech, and of gait, which he had pictured to himself when thinking of her.  Away at Nobble the females by whom he had been surrounded had not been attractive to him.  In all our colonies the women are beautiful and in the large towns a society is soon created, of which the fastidious traveller