‘That’s where you made the mistake,’ pursued the senior colonist; ‘you went on thinking that the good seasons were a-going to last for ever. If you’d kept on selling and _never spending_, you’d have had your money in your pocket now, and might have been in the market for some of these lots of first-rate store cattle that’s going a-begging―splendid fine-bred cattle, too, as you ever saw!’ Here Mr. Levison emptied the teapot with a benign expression, and, crossing his legs reflectively, looked with mild reproach at his entertainer. Ernest felt each item of guilty extravagance arise and arraign him separately, as Mr. Levison, with judicial enumeration, went on ticking off his pecuniary sins. In one of these lightning flashes of self-accusation with which conscience favours erring man, he realised the difference of his position from what it would have been if he had doggedly adhered to the scale of non-expenditure which he had found at Rainbar, and had retained the proceeds of his drafts of cattle with which to pay off his purchase-money, or re-invest in stores at the tempting tariff of the day. The faint counter-consolation that occurred to him, under the circumstances, was that if he had acted in such a way he would not have been Ernest Neuchamp at all, but must have changed his very nature and identity. So there was no more to be said. On the next morning Osmund was saddled for Mr. Levison, who, after saying that he would be back at sundown on the fifth day, departed for Mingadee. He was good enough to express his unqualified admiration of the gray horse’s make and shape as he mounted him. ‘I saw a lot of mares and foals knocking about at the big bend,’ he said. ‘Brood mares are useless wretches generally, and you can buy horses a deal cheaper than you raise ’em. But if you could turn out a few colts like this gray horse here, why, I should begin to think there was something in horse-breeding after all.’ On the fifth day punctually, about sundown, Mr. Levison reappeared at Rainbar. Having crossed the hundred miles of plain which separated the stations in two days, he remained one day, transacting the purchase of the store stock to which he had referred; then Osmund carried him back in two days, ‘quite flippant,’ as Jack Windsor observed. As he partook of the evening meal in company with Ernest, he essayed to cheer him up after the following fashion― ‘I’d a sort of notion that I’d checked off all your money-burying before I left. But it seems I wasn’t quite up to the number of holes a man can dig and fill up with sovereigns. I came across the Settlement!―regular town it is; and that native chap―active fellow he is, and no mistake―told me you’d paid the deposit money and given ’em employment, and advanced ’em money in other ways. I’ve seen new hands do many a blind trick, but I never knew a man before, of his own free will, bring down a lot of free selectors on his own run.’