d far away in the west, hardly earning better wages than an
English ploughman, and I am coming home with a pocket full of money! A
few glasses of whisky have made all the difference!'

The squire when he received this felt more of exultation than he had
ever known in his life. It seemed as though something of those
throbbings of delight which are common to most of us when we are young,
had come to him for the first time in his old age. He could not bring
himself to care in the least for Dick Shand. At last,--at last,--he was
going to have near him a companion that he could love.

'Well, yes; I suppose he has put together a little money,' he said to
Farmer Holt, when that worthy tenant asked enthusiastically as to the
truth of the rumours which were spread about as to the young squire's
success. 'I rather think he'll settle down and live in the old place
after all.'

'That's what he ought to do, squoire--that's what he ought to do,' said
Mr. Holt, almost choked by the energy of his own utterances.

Chapter XIV

Again at Home

On his arrival in England John Caldigate went instantly down to Folking.
He had come back quite fortified in his resolution of making Hester
Bolton his wife, if he should find Hester Bolton willing and if she
should have grown at all into that form and manner, into those ways of
look, of speech, and of gait, which he had pictured to himself when
thinking of her. Away at Nobble the females by whom he had been
surrounded had not been attractive to him. In all our colonies the women
are beautiful and in the large towns a society is soon created, of which
the fastidious traveller has very little ground to complain; but in the
small distant bush-towns, as they are called, the rougher elements must
predominate Our hero, though he had worn moleskin trousers and jersey
shirts, and had worked down a pit twelve hours a-day with a pickaxe, had
never reconciled himself to female roughnesses. He had condescended to
do so occasionally,--telling himself that it was his destiny to pass his
life among such surroundings; but his imagination had ever been at work
with him, and he possessed a certain aptitude for romance which told him
continually that Hester Bolton was the dream of his life, and ought to
become, if possible, the reality; and now he came back resolved to
attempt the reality,--unless he should find that the Hester Bolton of
Chesterton was altogether different from the Hester Bolton of hi