‘You are always charitably well informed, we know that, Croker,’ said Mr. Middleton. ‘Mind, I don’t put my trust in princes or counts of _his_ sort. I wonder how he gets along. Still swimmingly?’ ‘Don’t think the fellow has a shilling in the world myself—never did,’ replied Croker, with cheerful disbelief. ‘But from what I heard the other day, he will have to make his grand _coup_ soon, now that it’s known his chance of marrying Harriet Folleton is all up.’ ‘Is it finally unsettled, then, Mr. Croker?’ said Antonia. ‘Every one said she admired him so much.’ ‘She is quite equal to that or any other madness, I believe,’ said the well-informed Jermyn; ‘and, with her mother’s extraordinary folly to back her, there is no limit to the insanity she is capable of. But the old man _has_ a little sense—people who have made a pot of money often have—and he stopped the whole affair last week.’ * * * * * Mr. Neuchamp was, perhaps, more disturbed in mind than he had ever been since his arrival in Australia when he received the unusually laconic letter referred to from Paul Frankston. Surprise, anger, uncertainty by turns took possession of his soul. A wholly new and strangely mingled sensation arose in his mind. Had he misinterpreted his own emotions as well as those of Antonia? That such was the case as to his own feeling was evidenced by his sudden and unreasonable rage when he thought of Hardy Baldacre in the character of an accepted suitor for the hand of the unconventional, innocent girl whose half-childish, half-womanly expressions of wonder, admiration, dislike, or approval, called forth by incidents in their daily studies, he could _now_ so clearly remember. Had he, then, won that priceless gem, the unbought love of a pure and loving heart—no fleeting fancy, born of vanity or caprice, but the deeply-rooted, sacred, lifelong devotion of an untarnished virgin-soul, of a cultured and lofty intellect? This heavenly jewel had been suspended by a crowned angel above his head, and had he not, with sordid indifference, bent earthward, all unheeding, save of hard and anxious travail? He had narrowed his mind to beeves and kine, dry seasons and wet, all the merest workaday vulgarities of short-sighted mortals, resolute only in the pursuit of dross.