'I fear so. It is a kind of business,--gold-mining,--in which it is very hard for a man to know what he's worth. A claim that has been giving you a thousand pounds net every month for two years past, comes all of sudden a great deal worse than valueless. You can't give it up, and you have to throw back your thousands in profitless work.' 'I wouldn't do that,' said the squire. 'I'd stick to what I'd got,' said the Babington heir. 'It is a very difficult business,' said Caldigate, with a considerable amount of deportment, and an assumed look of age,--as though the cares of gold-seeking had made him indifferent to all the lighter joys of existence. 'But you mean to live at Folking?' asked Aunt Polly. 'I should think probably not. But a man situated as I am, never can say where he means to live.' 'But you are to have Folking?' whispered the squire,--whispered it so that all the party heard the words;--whispering not from reticence but excitement. 'That's the idea at present,' said the Folking heir. 'But Polyeuka is so much more to me than Folking. A gold mine with fifty or sixty thousand pounds worth of plant about it, Aunt Polly, is an imperious mistress.' In all this our hero was calumniating himself. Polyeuka and the plant he was willing to abandon on very moderate terms, and had arranged to wipe his hands of the whole concern if those moderate terms were accepted. But cousin Julia and aunt Polly were enemies against whom it was necessary to assume whatever weapons might come to his hand.