“And how she has restored it!”

“I hope Harold will not go and get those nuggets changed into specie.  They would make splendid ornaments—­so distingue with such a story attached to them.”

I could only again tell myself that my first impression had been right, and that he must be underwitted to be so absolutely impervious to gratitude.  How Harold must have bolstered him up to make him so tolerable as he had been.

He need not have feared.  Alice’s improvement was but a last flash of the expiring flame.  She grew worse the very day after Harold wrote to me, and did not live three weeks after he brought her into the town, though surrounded by such cares as she had never known before.  She died, they said, more from being worn out than from the disease.  She had done nothing her whole lifetime but toil for others; and if unselfishness and silent slavery can be religion in a woman, poor Alice had it.  But!

Harold once asked her the saddest question that perhaps a son could ask:  “Mother, why did you never teach me to say my prayers?”

She stared at him with her great, sunken, uncomplaining eyes, and said, “I hadn’t time;” and as he gave some involuntary groan, she said, “You see we never got religion, not Dorothy and me, while we were girls; and when our troubles came, I’m sure we’d no time for such things as that.  When your father lay a-dying, he did say, ’Alice, take care the boy gets to know his God better than we have done;’ but you were a great big boy by that time, and I thought I would take care you was taught by marrying a parson and a schoolmaster; but there, I ought to have remembered there was none so hard on us as the parsons!”

Nor would she see a clergyman.  She had had enough of that sort, she said, with the only petulance she ever showed to Harold when he pressed it.  She did not object to his reading to her some of those passages in the Bible and Prayer-Book which had become most dear to him, but she seemed rather to view it as one of the wonderful performances of her boy—­a part of his having become “as good an English gentleman as ever his poor father was, and able to hold up his head with any of them.”  She was too ill to be argued with; she said “she trusted in God,” whatever she meant by that; and so she died, holding Harold’s hand as long as her fingers could clasp, and gazing at him as long as her eyes could see.

He wrote to me all out of his overflowing heart, as he could never have spoken by word of mouth, on his voyage between New Zealand and Australia; and on his arrival there, finding our letters just before the mail went out, he added the characteristic line to the one he had written to Eustace, “All right, old chap, I wish you joy;” and to me he wrote, that since I asked what he wished, he thought I had better take a house by the year in, or near, Mycening, and see how things would turn out.  He hoped I should keep Dora.  We need not write again, for he should leave Sydney before our letters could arrive.