The sealing business, he said with a laugh, was only carried on at certain times of the year, but it was a most paying affair, and he bade Mrs Hallam have no care about money matters. For the first six months Hallam rarely stirred out of the house by day, contenting himself with a walk about the extensive grounds in an evening; but he made up for this abstinence from society by pampering his appetites in every way. It was as if, these having been kept in strict subjection for so many years, he was now determined to give them full rein; and, consequently, he who had been summoned at early morn by the prison bell, breakfasted luxuriously in bed, and did not rise till midday, when his first question was about the preparations for dinner--that being the important business of his life. His dinner was a feast at which good wine in sufficient abundance played a part, and over this he and Crellock would sit for hours, only to leave it and the dining-room for spirits and cigars in the verandah, where they stayed till bed-time. Robert Hallam came into the house a pallid, wasted man, with sunken cheeks and eyes, closely-cropped hair and shorn beard; the villainous prison look was in his gaze and the furtive shrinking way of his stoop. His aspect was so horrible that when Millicent Hallam took him to her breast, she prayed for mental blindness that she might not see the change, while Julia's eyes were always full of a wondering horror that she was ever fighting to suppress. At the end of four months, Robert Hallam was completely transformed; his cheeks were filled out, and were rapidly assuming the flushed appearance of the habitual drunkard's; his eyes had lost their cavernous aspect, and half the lines had disappeared, while his grizzled hair was of a respectable length, and his face was becoming clothed by a great black beard dashed with grey. In six months, portly, florid and well-dressed, he was unrecognisable for the man who had been released from the great prison, and no longer confined himself to the house. Stephen Crellock had changed in a more marked manner than his prison friend. Considerably his junior, the convict life had not seemed to affect him, so that when six months of his freedom had passed, he looked the bluff, bearded squatter in the full pride of his manhood, bronzed by the sun, and with a dash and freedom of manner that he knew how to restrain when he was in the presence of his old companion's wife and child, for he could not conceal from himself the fact that Mrs Hallam disliked his presence and resented his being there. At first, in her eagerness to respond to Hallam's slightest wish, in the proud joy she felt in the change that was coming over his personal appearance, and which with the boastfulness of a young wife she pointed out to Julia, she made no objection to Crellock's presence. "Poor fellow! he has suffered horribly," Hallam said. "He deserves a holiday."