“My illness, in which I was ‘like to die’ following closely.
“We thought you had left without troubling to answer our letters—at least, they did. My sister has written you sheets, so I need not enlarge upon matters. Edward is still in Queensland. The weather is lovely now, after the cold winter. If you can tear yourself away from Hobart, you might see what Marondah looks like in early summer.
“Yours truly,
“Imogen.”
Mr. Blount’s reply, by telegram, was sent with no unnecessary loss of time:—
“Leaving for Melbourne and Marondah by to-morrow’s steamer.”
Other letters, papers, circulars, requests, invitations in shoals lay ready for inspection. All the tentative appeals, complimentary and otherwise, which track the successful individual in war or peace, law, letters, or commerce. A large proportion of these were transmitted to the waste-paper basket—a piece of furniture now rendered necessary by the volume of Mr. Blount’s correspondence.
He felt inclined to burn the whole lot, excepting those relative to the development of the Tasmanian Comstock and Associated Silver Mines Company (Limited), now stamped on a score of large and portentous envelopes.
Making a final search, a letter was detached from a superincumbent mass, the superscription of which had the Tumut and Bunjil postmarks. This was sufficient to arrest his attention. The handwriting, too, was that of Sheila Maguire, whose interest in his welfare did not seem to have declined.
“Dear Mr. Blount,—I little thought, when I used to get up at all hours to make you comfortable in our back block shanty, that this humble individual was ministering (that’s a good word, isn’t it? I’ve been reading up at odd times) to the wants of a Director of the Great Comstock Silver Mines Company. What a lark it seems, doesn’t it? And you, that didn’t know the difference between quartz and alluvial then!