h he has
swallowed, is by no means discomposed because he has no clean linen for
the morrow. All this Caldigate understood thoroughly;--but there was a
difficulty in explaining it to Dick Shand's mother. 'I think there would
be some trouble about the address,' he said.

'But you must know so many people out there.'

'I have never been in Queensland myself, and have no acquaintance with
squatters. But that is not all, Mrs. Shand.'

'What else? You can tell me. Of course I know what it is that he has
come to. I don't blind myself to it, Mr. Caldigate, even though I am his
mother. But I am his mother; and if I could comfort him, just a
little----'

'Clothes are not what he wants;--of clothes he can get what is
necessary, poor as he is.'

'What is it he wants most?'

'Somebody to speak to;--some one to be kind to him.'

'My poor boy!'

'As he has fallen to what he is now, so can he rise again if he can find
courage to give his mind to it. I think that if you write to him and
tell him so, that will be better than sending him shirts. The doctor has
been talking to me about money for him.'

'But, Mr. Caldigate, he couldn't drink the shirts out there in the bush.
Here, where there is a pawn-broker at all the corners, they drink
everything.'

He had promised to stay two days at Pollington and was of course aware
of the dangers among which he walked. Maria had been by no means the
first to welcome him. All the other girls had presented themselves
before her. And when at last she did come forward she was very shy. The
eldest daughter had married her clergyman though he was still only a
curate; and the second had been equally successful with Lieutenant
Postlethwaite though the lieutenant had been obliged in consequence to
leave the army and to earn his bread by becoming agent to a soap-making
company. Maria Shand was still Maria Shand, and was it not too probable
that she had remained so for the sake of that companion who had gone
away with her darling brother Dick? 'Maria has been thinking so much
about your coming,' said the youngest,--not the girl who had been
impertinent and ill-behaved before, for she had since become a grown-up
Miss Shand, and had a young attorney of her own on hand, and was
supposed to be the one of the family most likely to carry her pigs to a
good market,--but the youngest of them all who had been no more than a
child when he had been at Pollington before. 'I hope she is at home,'
said Caldig