t
the doctor could only declare that she had a fatal disease of long
standing and must die, though care and comfort might a little while
prolong her life. It was welcome news to poor Alice, provided she
might only die while her boy was still with her, shutting out all that
had so long made her life one ground-down course of hopeless
wretchedness.

Smith's most profitable form of employment was carrying dinners out to
the men at work; and for an hour or two at noon the little store was
entirely free from customers. The day after the doctor's visit, Dermot
came in at this time to speak to Harold, and as soon as Alice knew of
his presence (there was a mere partition of slab between her bed and
the shop), she eagerly and nervously bade him stay and keep watch that
no one should come near to see or hear. Then, when certain that she
was alone with her son, she produced from hiding-places about her
person what appeared to be three balls of worsted--her eyes gleaming,
and her whole person starting at every sound. She laid her skeleton
fingers over them with a start of terror, as Harold, puzzled at first,
would have unwound one; but made him weigh them, parted the covering
with her nail, and showed for one instant a yellow gleam. Each held a
nugget of unusual size! Her urgency and her terror were excessive till
they were out of sight in his pockets, though he protested that this
was but to satisfy her for the moment; he could not keep them. She
laid her head so close to his that she could whisper, and told him they
were not meant for him. They were payment for the L200 of which her
husband had defrauded the elder Eustace, and which had been a heavy
weight ever since on her high-spirited pride. By one of the strange
chances that often befell in the early days of the goldfields, she,
going to draw water at a little stream soon after her first arrival,
had seen these lying close together in the bed of the shallow
rivulet--three lumps of gold formed by a freak of nature into the
likeness of the golden pippins her father used to be so proud of, and
the gathering of which had been the crisis of the courtship of the two
handsome lads from Arghouse.

With the secretiveness that tyranny had taught her, Alice hid her
treasure; and with the inborn honest pride which had, under Smith's
dominion, cost her so much suffering, she swore to herself that they
should go to Eustace to wipe out the fraud against his father. She had
soug