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‘Have your pay put into my private account while you’re away. I’ll manage somehow. The five hundred pounds ought to frank you there, and do all the taking up and so on—with care.’

‘Yes, and careful enough we shall have to be; there’ll be no more when that’s gone. It’s the “last chance” in every sense of the word.’

‘I shall be lonely enough while you’re away, my dear; but we have had to do without each other before—and must again. You’ll write regularly—a letter will always cheer me up. I shan’t suffer for want of employment, that’s one thing.’

The Commissioner got his leave of absence on the ground of ‘urgent private affairs’—which was ssss1 only just, as he had been hard at it for several years, without change or respite, in one of the most difficult, anxious, wearing occupations in the Civil Service: that of Warden, and Police Magistrate, on a large alluvial goldfield. To rule over an excitable population, varying from ten to twenty thousand; to hear and decide the interminable mining lawsuits arising from the production of tons of gold—literally tons, won, held, and distributed under a code of mining laws, of a sufficiently complicated nature, and appearing to the unlearned a mass of confused, contradictory regulations, was no sinecure. The amounts, too, in question were often incredibly large, so that a mistake in law, or an error in judgment, magnified by the local press, assumed gigantic proportions in the eye of the public. In the police department of jurisdiction, murders and robberies, though not alarmingly frequent, were occasionally matters of by no means a quantité négligeable. Excitable public meetings were common, and, as an outlet for smouldering popular feeling, answered a good purpose.