’A man has more than one chance.  When he found how it was with him, he should have abstained.  A man must pay the fine of his own weakness.’

’Oh, yes.  It is all understood somewhere, I suppose, though we don’t understand it.  I tell you what it is, Dr. Shand.  If you think that five hundred pounds left with you can be of any assistance, you can have it.’

But the doctor seemed to doubt whether the money would do any good, and refused to take it, at any rate for the present.  What could he do with it, if he did take it?  ’I fear that he must lie upon his bed as he has made it,’ said the doctor sorrowfully.  ’It is a complaint which money cannot cure, but can always exaggerate.  If, without costing myself or my family a shilling, I could put a thousand pounds into his hands to-morrow, I do not know whether I ought to do it.’

‘You will remember my offer.’

The doctor thanked him, and said that he would remember.  So the conversation was ended, and the doctor went about the ordinary occupation of his life, apparently without any settled grief at his heart.  He had done his duty by his son, and that sufficed,—­or almost sufficed, for him.

Then came the mother’s turn.  Could anything be sent to the poor lost one,—­to poor Dick?  Clothes ran chiefly in her mind.  If among them they could make up a dozen of shirts, would there be any assured means of getting them conveyed safely to Dick’s shepherd-hut out in the Queensland bush?  In answer to this Caldigate would fain have explained, had it been possible, that Dick would not care much for a dozen new shirts,—­that they would be to him, even if received, almost as little a source of comfort as would be a ton of Newcastle coals.  He had sunk below shirts by the dozen; almost below single shirts, such as Mrs. Shand and her daughters would be able to fabricate.  Some upper flannel garment, and something in the nature of trousers, with a belt round his middle, and an old straw-hat would be all the wardrobe required by him.  Men by dint of misery rise above the need of superfluities.  The poor wretch whom you see rolling himself, as it were, at the corner of the street within his old tattered filthy coat, trying to extract something more of life and warmth out of the last glass of gin which he has swallowed, is by no means discomposed because he has no clean linen for the morrow.  All this Caldigate understood thoroughly;—­but there was a difficulty in explaining it to Dick Shand’s mother.  ’I think there would be some trouble about the address,’ he said.

‘But you must know so many people out there.’

’I have never been in Queensland myself, and have no acquaintance with squatters.  But that is not all, Mrs. Shand.’

’What else?  You can tell me.  Of course I know what it is that he has come to.  I don’t blind myself to it, Mr. Caldigate, even though I am his mother.  But I am his mother; and if I could comfort him, just a little——­’