’If I’d been a young man, I dare say I should have felt different when they told me how rich I was; it gave me no pleasure at first, and when I’d had time to think about it I only grew worried.  I even thought once or twice of getting rid of the burden by giving all the money to a hospital in Sydney or Melbourne.  But then I remembered that the poor in the old country had more claim on me, and when I’d got used to the idea of being a wealthy man, I found myself recalling all sorts of fancies and wishes that used to come into my head when I was working hard for a poor living.  It took some time to get all the lawyer’s business finished, and by when it was done I began to see a way before me.  First of all I must find my son in England, and see if he needed help.  I hadn’t made any change in my way of living, and I came back from Australia as a steerage passenger, wearing the same clothes that I’d worked in.  The lawyer laughed at me, but I’m sure I should have laughed at myself if I’d dressed up as a gentleman and begun to play the fool in my old age.  The money wasn’t to be used in that way.  I’d got my ideas, and they grew clearer during the voyage home.

’You know how I found Jane.  Not long after, I put an advertisement in the papers, asking my son, if he saw it, to communicate with Mr. Percival—­that’s the lawyer I was recommended to in London.  There was no answer; Joseph was in America at that time.  I hadn’t much reason to like Mrs. Peckover and her daughter, but I kept up acquaintance with them because I thought they might hear of Jo some day.  And after a while I sent Jane to learn a business.  Do you know why I did that?  Can you think why I brought up the child as if I’d only had just enough to keep us both, and never gave a sign that I could have made a rich lady of her?’

In asking the question, he bent forward and laid his hand on Sidney’s shoulder.  His eyes gleamed with that light which betrays the enthusiast, the idealist.  As he approached the explanation to which his story had tended, the signs of age and weakness disappeared before the intensity of his feeling.  Sidney understood now why he had always been conscious of something in the man’s mind that was not revealed to him, of a life-controlling purpose but vaguely indicated by the general tenor of Michael’s opinions.  The latter’s fervour affected him, and he replied with emotion: 

’You wish Jane to think of this money as you do yourself—­not to regard it as wealth, but as the means of bringing help to the miserable.’

’That is my thought, Sidney.  It came to me in that form whilst I was sitting by her bed, when she was ill at Mrs. Peckover’s.  I knew nothing of her character then, and the idea I had might have come to nothing through her turning out untrustworthy.  But I thought to myself:  Suppose she grows up to be a good woman—­suppose I can teach her to look at things in the same way as I do myself, train her to feel that no happiness could be greater