’Clothes are not what he wants;—­of clothes he can get what is necessary, poor as he is.’

‘What is it he wants most?’

‘Somebody to speak to;—­some one to be kind to him.’

‘My poor boy!’

’As he has fallen to what he is now, so can he rise again if he can find courage to give his mind to it.  I think that if you write to him and tell him so, that will be better than sending him shirts.  The doctor has been talking to me about money for him.’

’But, Mr. Caldigate, he couldn’t drink the shirts out there in the bush.  Here, where there is a pawn-broker at all the corners, they drink everything.’

He had promised to stay two days at Pollington and was of course aware of the dangers among which he walked.  Maria had been by no means the first to welcome him.  All the other girls had presented themselves before her.  And when at last she did come forward she was very shy.  The eldest daughter had married her clergyman though he was still only a curate; and the second had been equally successful with Lieutenant Postlethwaite though the lieutenant had been obliged in consequence to leave the army and to earn his bread by becoming agent to a soap-making company.  Maria Shand was still Maria Shand, and was it not too probable that she had remained so for the sake of that companion who had gone away with her darling brother Dick?  ’Maria has been thinking so much about your coming,’ said the youngest,—­not the girl who had been impertinent and ill-behaved before, for she had since become a grown-up Miss Shand, and had a young attorney of her own on hand, and was supposed to be the one of the family most likely to carry her pigs to a good market,—­but the youngest of them all who had been no more than a child when he had been at Pollington before.  ‘I hope she is at home,’ said Caldigate ’At home!  Of course she’s at home.  She wouldn’t be away when you’re coming!’

The Shands were demonstrative, always;—­and never hypocritical.  Here it was; told at once,—­the whole story.  He was to atone for having left Dick in the lurch by marrying Maria.  There did seem to him to be a certain amount of justice in the idea; but then, unfortunately, it could not be carried out.  If there were nothing else against it but the existence of the young lady at Chesterton, that alone would have been sufficient.  And then, though Maria Shand was very well, though, no doubt, she would make a true and loving wife to any husband, though there had been a pretty touch of feeling about the Thomson’s ’Seasons,’—­still, still, she was not all that he fancied that a wife should be.  He was quite willing to give L500 for Dick; but after that he thought that he would have had almost enough of the Shands.  He could not marry Maria, and so he must say plainly if called upon to declare himself in the matter.  There was an easiness about the family generally which enabled him to hope that the difficulty would be light.  It would be as nothing compared with that coming scene between himself and aunt Polly, perhaps between himself and his uncle Babington, or perhaps,—­worse again,—­between himself and Julia!