He’d bought cattle-stations on the Lachlan just when the gold broke out first, and everybody thought station property was never going to be worth nothing again. Now, since cattle had risen and meat and all to such a price, he was making money hand over fist. More than that, as I said before, he’d been made a magistrate, and all the swells began to take notice of him—not altogether because he’d made money either; what I call the real swells, as far as I see, won’t do that. If they don’t care for a man—no matter how much money he’s made—they hold shy of him. But if he’s a straight-going good sort of fellow, that has his head screwed on the right way, and don’t push himself forward too much, they’ll meet him half way, and a very good thing, too.

We could see George was going upwards and out of our lot, beginning to mix with different people and get different notions—not but what he was always kind and friendly in his way to Aileen and mother, and would have been to us if he’d ever seen us. But all his new friends were different kind of people, and after a bit, Aileen said, we’d only be remembered as people he’d known when he was young, and soon, when the old lady died, we’d be asked into the kitchen and not into the parlour. Aileen used to laugh when she talked like this, and say she’d come and see George when he’d married a lady, and what fun it would be to remind Gracey of the time they threshed the oats out together at Rocky Flat. But still, laugh and all, I could see, though she talked that way, it made her feel wretched all the while, because she couldn’t help thinking that we ought to have done just as well as George, and might have been nigh-hand as far forward if we’d kept straight. If we’d only kept straight! Ah, there was where the whole mistake lay.

It often seems to me as if men and women ought to have two lives—an old one and a new one—one to repent of the other; the first one to show men what they ought to keep clear of in the second. When you think how foolish-like and childish man or woman commits their first fault, not so bad in itself, but enough often to shut them out from nearly all their chances of good in this world, it does seem hardish that one life should end all under the sun. Of course, there’s the other and we don’t know what’s coming, but there’s so many different notions about that a chap like me gets puzzled, and looks on it as out of his line altogether.