etters, containing
remittances, were due. By inquiry, they were traced to the goldfields;
and thither Harold and Dermot repaired, through curious experiences and
recognitions of old army and London friends of Dermot's, now diggers or
mounted police. Save for one of these gentlemen, much better educated
than Harold, but now far rougher looking, they would never have found
the house where "Parson Smith" (a title that most supposed to be
entirely unfounded) made a greater profit by selling the necessaries of
life to the diggers, than did his son by gold-digging and washing.

Poor Alice, the stately farmhouse beauty of thirty years ago, was a
stooping, haggard, broken-down wreck--not a slattern, but an overworked
drudge, with a face fitter for seventy than for fifty years old, and a
ghastly look of long-continued sickness.

Her husband was out, and she sat, propped up in a chair behind the
board that served for a counter, still attending to the shop; and thus
it was that her son beheld her when he stooped under the low doorway,
with the one word, "Mother."

Dermot had waited outside, but Harold called him in the next moment.
"He will mind the shop, mother. I'll carry you to your bed. You are
not fit to be here a moment."

And Dermot found himself selling tobacco, tin cups, and knives to very
rough-looking customers, some of whom spoke in as refined a voice as he
could do, and only asked what green chum the parson could have picked
up instead of the sickly missus.

Alice Smith was indeed far gone in illness, the effect of exposure,
drudgery, and hard usage. Perhaps her husband might have had mercy on
her, but they were both cowed by the pitiless brute of a step-son,
whose only view was to goad her into driving their profitable traffic
to her last gasp. But there was no outbreak between them and Harold.
The father's nature was to cringe and fawn, and the son estimated those
thews and muscles too well to gratify his hatred by open provocation,
and was only surly and dogged, keeping himself almost entirely out of
the way. Alice wanted nothing but to look at her son--"her beautiful
boy," "her Harry come back to her at last;" and kind and tender to her
and loving, as he had never been since his baby days; but he would have
moved heaven and earth to obtain comforts and attendance for her.
Dermot rode a fabulous distance, and brought back a doctor for a
fabulous fee, and loaded his horse with pillows and medicaments; bu