to be gracious. 'I hope you may succeed in your enterprise,
Mr. Caldigate.'

'Why should I not as well as another?' said John, cheerily.

'If you are steady, sober, industrious, self-denying and honest, you
probably will,' replied the banker.

'To promise all that would be to promise too much,' said John. 'But I
mean to make an effort.'

Then at that moment he made one effort which was successful. For an
instant he held Hester's fingers within his hand.

Chapter III

Daniel Caldigate

That piece of business was done. It was one of the disagreeable things
which he had had to do before he could get away to the gold-diggings,
and it was done. Now he had to say farewell to his father, and that
would be a harder task. As the moment was coming in which he must bid
adieu to his father, perhaps for ever, and bid adieu to the old place
which, though he despised it, he still loved, his heart was heavy within
him. He felt sure that his father had no special regard for him;--in
which he was, of course, altogether wrong, and the old man was equally
wrong in supposing that his son was unnaturally deficient in filial
affection. But they had never known each other, and were so different
that neither had understood the other. The son, however, was ready to
confess to himself that the chief fault had been with himself. It was
natural, he thought, that a father's regard should be deadened by such
conduct as his had been, and natural that an old man should not believe
in the quick repentance and improvement of a young one.

He hired a gig and drove himself over from Cambridge to Folking. As he
got near to the place, and passed along the dikes, and looked to the
right and left down the droves, and trotted at last over the Folking
bridge across the Middle Wash, the country did not seem to him to be so
unattractive as of yore; and when he recognised the faces of the
neighbours, when one of the tenants spoke to him kindly, and the girls
dropped a curtsey as he passed, certain soft regrets began to crop up in
his mind. After all, there is a comfort in the feeling of property--not
simply its money comfort, but in the stability and reputation of a
recognised home. Six months ago there had seemed to him to be something
ridiculous in the idea of a permanent connection between the names of
Caldigate and Folking. It was absurd that, with so wild and beautiful a
world around him, he should be called upon to live in a washy fen
bec