Mrs.
Bolton appeared. The reader is not to suppose that she was an ugly,
cross-looking old woman. She was neither ugly, nor old, nor cross. When
she had married Mr. Bolton, she had been quite young, and now she was
not much past forty. And she was handsome too, with a fine oval face
which suited well with the peculiar simplicity of her dress and the
sober seriousness of her gait and manner. It might, perhaps, be said of
her that she tried to look old and ugly,--and cross too, but that she
did not succeed. She now greeted her visitor very coldly, and having
asked after old Mr. Caldigate, sat silent looking at John Caldigate as
though there were nothing more possible for her to say.

'I could not but come to see you and thank you for your kindness before
I went,' said John.

'I remember your coming about some business. We have very few visitors
here.'

'I went out, you know, as a miner.'

'I think I heard Mr. Bolton say so.'

'And I have succeeded very well.'

'Oh, indeed!'

'So well that I have been able to come back; and though I may perhaps
be obliged to revisit the colony to settle my affairs there, I am going
to live here at home.'

'I hope that will be comfortable to you.' At every word she spoke, her
voice took more and more plainly that tone of wonder which we are all of
us apt to express when called on to speak on matters which we are at the
moment astonished to have introduced to us.

'Yes; Mrs. Bolton, I hope it will. And now I have got something
particular to say.'

'Perhaps you had better see--Mr. Bolton--at the bank.'

'I hope I may be able to do so. I quite intend it. But as I am here, if
you will allow me, I will say a word to you first. In all matters there
is nothing so good as being explicit.' She looked at him as though she
was altogether afraid of him. And indeed she was. Her husband's opinion
of the young man had been very bad five years ago,--and she had not
heard that it had been altered since. Young men who went out to the
colonies because they were ruined, were, to her thinking, the worst
among the bad,--men who drank and gambled and indulged in strange lives,
mere castaways, the adopted of Satan. And, to her thinking, among men,
none were so rough as miners,--and among miners none were so godless, so
unrestrained so wild as the seekers after gold. She had read, perhaps,
something of the Spaniards in Central America, and regarded such
adventurers as she would pirates and freeboote