“Not at all handsome, if I chance to lose it all.  One needs to keep one’s weather eye open, in dealing with old hands like you, Mrs. Peck.”

“Then you won’t do this for me—­such a trifling accommodation as it is?”

“Not without some one to back you,” said the money-lender.

“I daresay I can easily find that, if you are so stiff,” said Mrs. Peck, as she flounced off in great indignation, and with very little hope of succeeding in what was required.

Here was she in possession of a secret worth so much to her, and unable to turn it to account for want of a beggarly ten or twelve pounds.  The bill discounter was too sharp for her; she must try a good-natured man next, one who would be willing to do her a kindness—­but here again, Mr. Talbot’s letter, her only authority to give any security, would injure her more than with the keen man of the world.  There was a steamer to sail on the morrow for Melbourne, and no other for a week or ten days; every day was of the greatest consequence, for now that she had made up her mind not to make terms with Francis, but to do so with his cousins, she was eager to carry her resolution into practice, and she must get on board the Havilah, if possible.

She had lived some weeks in Adelaide in rather a poor way, and in rather a poor neighbourhood, when she and Peck had come first across.  She had made acquaintance with a very few people, and had left Adelaide slightly in debt, but in her eagerness she was inclined to overlook those circumstances, and to hope that some one or other of her late neighbours might be prevailed on to be a guarantee to the money-lender merely as a matter of form, and he might be induced to accept of it; so she turned her steps in the direction of her old residence.

She looked into the shop where she had been accustomed to make her purchases of groceries, with an intention of paying the eleven shillings which she owed if things looked promising, and if it would be a good speculation.

“Well Mrs. Smith, and how are you?” said she to the woman who kept the establishment with the favourite old Adelaide sign of “General Store.”

“Much as usual, Mrs. Peck.  You went away rather in a hurry,” said Mrs. Smith.

“Oh!  Peck had to go off to the sheep-shearing, and I had the offer of a good nursing in the country, so I had to move at a minute’s warning, you see.  But how are you getting on here?”

“Much as usual, Mrs. Peck; but the news is, that my man came home last night, after being at them diggings for four years, and not writing me a word, good or bad, for three and more; and now he expects me to be as sweet as sugar to him after serving me so; and me had all his children to keep and do for, and got no help from him no more nor if he was dead; and now he says as how I give him the cold shoulder.”

“Well, to be sure, and no wonder either!  When a woman’s been served so, she has the right to look a bit stiff,” said Mrs. Peck, who had heard during her stay in Adelaide that Mrs. Smith had passed judgment by default, and was going to take to herself another mate, which was nothing more than the absent Smith deserved.