has very little ground to complain; but in the small distant bush-towns, as they are called, the rougher elements must predominate Our hero, though he had worn moleskin trousers and jersey shirts, and had worked down a pit twelve hours a-day with a pickaxe, had never reconciled himself to female roughnesses.  He had condescended to do so occasionally,—­telling himself that it was his destiny to pass his life among such surroundings; but his imagination had ever been at work with him, and he possessed a certain aptitude for romance which told him continually that Hester Bolton was the dream of his life, and ought to become, if possible, the reality; and now he came back resolved to attempt the reality,—­unless he should find that the Hester Bolton of Chesterton was altogether different from the Hester Bolton of his dreams.

The fatted calf was killed for him in a very simple but full-hearted way.  There was no other guest to witness the meeting.  ’And here you are,’ said the father.

‘Yes, sir, here I am;—­all that’s left of me.’

‘There is quite plenty,’ said the father, looking at the large proportions of his son.  ’It seems but a day or two since you went;—­and yet they have been long days.  I hardly expected to see you again, John,—­certainly not so soon as this; certainly not in such circumstances.  If ever a man was welcome to a house, you are welcome to this.  And now,—­what do you mean to do with yourself?’

’By nine o’clock to-morrow morning you will probably find a pit opened on the lawn, and I shall be down to the middle, looking for gold.  Ah, sir, I wish you could have known poor Mick Maggott.’

’If he would have made holes in my lawn I am glad he did not come home with you.’  This was the first conversation, but both the father and son felt that there was a tone about it which had never before been heard between them.

John Caldigate at this time was so altered in appearance, that they who had not known him well might possibly have mistaken him.  He was now nearly thirty, but looked older than his age.  The squareness of his brow was squarer, and here and there through his dark brown hair there was to be seen an early tinge of coming grey; and about his mouth was all the decision of purpose which comes to a man when he is called upon to act quickly on his own judgment in matters of importance; and there was that look of self-confidence which success gives.  He had thriven in all that he had undertaken.  In that gold-finding business of his he had made no mistakes.  Men who had been at it when a boy had tried to cheat him, but had failed.  He had seen into such mysteries as the business possessed with quick glances, and had soon learned to know his way.  And he had neither gambled nor drank,—­which are the two rocks on which gold-miners are apt to wreck their vessels.  All this gave him an air of power and self-assertion which might, perhaps, have been distasteful to an indifferent acquaintance, but which at this