Such a conversation as this occurred pretty frequently during the long interval in which Francis Tredethlyn waited for the answer to his letter. Sometimes, when Harcourt Lowther was in a very bad temper, he would accuse his attendant of having grown proud and insolent and lazy, since the advent of that _Times_ newspaper, which the ensign had borrowed from Mr. Corbett; but every one of the accusations was as groundless as many other of the officer’s complaints against people and things in general. There was no change in Francis Tredethlyn: he did his work cheerfully and well, obeyed orders in a frank, manly spirit, and behaved himself altogether in a most exemplary manner. The time when a letter from England might be expected came round at last; but Francis Tredethlyn evinced no anxiety for the arrival of the solicitors’ epistle. A long season of drought had given way before a sudden downfall of rain, and Harcourt Lowther, who had planned a couple of days’ kangaroo hunting, and had made all necessary arrangements for the performance of his duties by a good-natured and efficient colour-sergeant, found himself a prisoner in his cottage at Port Arthur, with nothing to do but wait for a change in the weather. It was very tiresome. The accomplished, light-hearted Harcourt Lowther, who could take life so pleasantly in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia or Belgravia, to whom a summer afternoon amongst a group of fashionable gossips in the smoking-room of his favourite club was only too short, found this terrible Tasmanian day intolerably long. He had tried every available way of getting rid of his time. He had sketched a little, and read a little, and played the flute a little, and smoked a great deal, and had relieved the oppression of his spirits by an incalculable number of yawns, and a little occasional bad language. And now, having exhausted all these resources, he stood with his head leaning listlessly against the roughly finished sash of the window, watching the convict labourers at work under the heavy rain. He derived some faint ray of comfort from the signs of those two men. At any rate, there were some people in the world worse off than himself,--unlucky wretches who were obliged to work in wet weather, and wear a hideous dress, and eat coarse unpalatable food, or food that appeared abominably coarse and unpalatable in the eyes of Mr. Harcourt Lowther, who had been known upon occasion to turn up his nose at the culinary masterpieces of Soyer and Francatelli.