Chapter Sixteen.
A Miner’s Marriage.
It was the cool season in Sydney. In other words, it was winter just commencing; so, what with balmy air and beauty everywhere around, no wonder Archie soon got well. He had the kindest treatment too, and he had youth and hope.
He could now write home to his parents and Elsie a long, cheerful letter without any twinge of conscience. He was going to begin work soon in downright earnest, and get straight away from city life, and all its allurements; he wondered, he said, it had not occurred to him to do this before, only it was not too late to mend even yet. He hated city life now quite as much as he had previously loved it, and been enamoured of it.
It never rains but it pours, and on the very day after he posted his packet to Burley he received a registered letter from his uncle. It contained a bill of exchange for fifty pounds. Archie blushed scarlet when he saw it.
Now had this letter and its contents been from his father, knowing all he did of the straits at home, he would have sent the money back. But his uncle evidently knew whom he had to deal with; for he assured Archie in his letter that it was a loan, not a gift. He might want it he said, and he really would be obliging him by accepting it. He—Uncle Ramsay—knew what the world was, and so on and so forth, and the letter ended by requesting Archie to say nothing about it to his parents at present.
“Dear old boy,” said Archie half aloud, and tears of gratitude sprang to his eyes. “How thoughtful and kind! Well, it’ll be a loan, and I’ll pray every night that God may spare him till I get home to shake his honest brown paw, and thrust the fifty pounds back into it. No, it would be really unkind to refuse it.”
He went straight away—walking on feathers—to Bob’s hotel. He found him and Harry sitting out on the balcony drinking sherbet. He took a seat beside them.
“I’m in clover, boys,” he cried exultingly, as he handed the cash to Bob to look at.
“So you are,” said Bob, reading the figures. “Well, this is what my old mother would call a Godsend. I always said your Uncle Ramsay was as good as they make ’em.”