Osmund and Ben Bolt were safely bestowed in a snug but unpretending stable not a hundred miles from Bent Street, and Mr. Windsor, as a man who ’knew his way about,’ even in a strange city, was left temporarily to his own guidance, merely being requested to report himself at Morahmee. Every Englishman knows what important step Ernest took next. His hair reduced to the smallest visible quantity, and the luxuriance of his beard, which he had lately permitted full liberty of growth, rationally restricted, he betook himself to the well-known counting-house. The grave head clerk, who had acquired such solemn doubts as to Mr. Hartley Selmore’s final destination, smiled, under protest, when he announced ‘a gentleman on business,’ by Ernest’s request. Old Paul looked up with his usual good-natured expression, then stared in unrecognising blankness at the bronzed and bearded figure before him, finally to burst into a perfect tempest of laughter and chuckling, shaking Ernest’s hands violently with both of his, and making as if he could throw himself on the neck of his safe returning _protégé_. ‘Ha! ha! ha! so you’re back again, are you, Ernest, my boy? By Jove, I’m glad to see you; burnt brown enough too—shows you’ve been working; like to see it—none the worse looking for it, either, I know the girls will say. But, I say—ha! ha! ha! known by the police, eh? Captain Jinks, alias Gentleman Jack, and the _other prisoner_, eh, my boy? How I roared at that till Antonia was quite savage—for _her_ you know. Didn’t take your photo, did they? generally do, you know. Got an album, for reference, at all the chief police stations. You’re coming out, of course, to-night. Antonia will be awfully glad; don’t tell her I said so. ‘Look here, my dear boy, I was just bothering this old head of mine about some business matters—hang them. You run away out to Morahmee, and tell Antonia to have dinner ready to the minute, or I’ll murder the whole household. Now off with you!’ Ernest departed, nothing loath, and as he whirled out, hansom-borne, along the well-remembered road, and gazed once more upon the blue waters, the frowning headland, the green villa-dotted shores of the unequalled harbour, he mentally contrasted these with the gray monotonous plains of Garrandilla, or the equally monotonous waterless woodlands. ‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘I feel like a schoolboy home for the holidays, or a sailor back from a cruise; and all for the pleasure of returning to Sydney, a place I had scarcely heard of a couple of years since. Am I the same Ernest Neuchamp that knew Paris pretty well before he was of age, and Vienna to boot?