first meeting was very pleasing to the father.  His son was somebody,—­had done something, that son of whom he had been so thoroughly ashamed when the dealings with Davis had first been brought to light.  He had kept up his reading too; had strong opinions of his own respecting politics; regarded the colonies generally from a politico-economical point of view; had ideas on social, religious, and literary subjects sufficiently alike to his father’s not to be made disagreeable by the obstinacy with which he maintained them.  He had become much darker in colour, having been, as it seemed, bronzed through and through by colonial suns and colonial labour.  Altogether he was a son of whom any father might be proud, as long as the father managed not to quarrel with him.  Mr. Caldigate, who during the last four years had thought very much on the subject, was determined not to quarrel with his son.

‘You asked, sir, the other day what I meant to do?’

‘What are we to find to amuse you?’

’As for amusement, I could kill rats as I used to do; or slaughter a hecatomb of pheasants at Babington,’—­here the old man winced, though the word hecatomb reconciled him a little to the disagreeable allusion.  ’But it has come to me now that I want so much more than amusement.  What do you say to a farm?’

’On the estate?’—­and the landlord at once began to think whether there was any tenant who could be induced to go without injustice.

’About three times as big as the estate if I could find it.  A man can farm five thousand acres as well as fifty, I take it, if he have the capital.  I should like to cut a broad sward, or, better still, to roam among many herds.  I suppose a man should have ten pounds an acre to begin with.  The difficulty would be in getting the land.’  But all this was said half in joke; for he was still of opinion that he would, after his year’s holiday, be forced to return for a time to New South Wales.  He had fixed a price for which, up to a certain date, he would sell his interest in the Polyeuka mine.  But the price was high, and he doubted whether he would get it; and, if not, then he must return.

He had not been long at Folking,—­not as yet long enough to have made his way into the house at Chesterton,—­before annoyance arose.  Mrs. Shand was most anxious that he should go to Pollington and ’tell them anything about poor Dick.’  They did, in truth, know everything about poor Dick; that poor Dick’s money was all gone, and that poor Dick was earning his bread, or rather his damper, mutton, and tea, wretchedly, in the wilderness of a sheep-run in Queensland.  The mother’s letter was not very piteous, did not contain much of complaint,—­alluded to poor Dick as one whose poverty was almost natural, but still it was very pressing.  The girls were so anxious to hear all the details,—­particularly Maria!  The details of the life of a drunken sot are not pleasant tidings to be poured into a mother’s ear, or