Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
In an instant he was on his feet in the middle of the room, applying force to his sleep-cogged wits. He threw open the sash. "Who's there? What is it?" Henry Ocock's groom. "I was to fetch you out to our place at once, governor." "But Is Mrs. Henry taken ill?" "Not as I know of," said the man dryly. "But her and the boss had a bit of a tiff on the way home, and Madam's excited-like."
And driving to Ocock's office, on term day, he resolved to go on afterwards to the Bank of Australasia and there deposit this sum. Grindle, set off by a pair of flaming "sideboards," himself ushered Mahony into the sanctum, and the affair was disposed of in a trice.
He thought he could trace some of the mischief back to the professional knocks and jars Ocock's action had brought down on him: to hear one's opinion doubted, one's skill questioned, was the tyro's portion; he was too old to treat such insolence with the scorn it deserved.
True, during the morning Miss Amelia Ocock, a gentle little elderly body with a harmless smile and a prominent jaw, who was now an inmate of her father's house, together with Zara, returned from England and a visitor at the Ocock's these two walked over to offer their aid in setting the tables.
At the corner of the street the friends paused for a hasty conference. Mahony was for marching off to take the best legal advice the city had to offer. But Purdy disapproved. Why put himself to so much trouble, when he had old Ocock's recommendation to his lawyer-son in his coat pocket?
Henry Ocock's greeting resembled an embrace "It evidently means a fortune for him" and all trifling personal differences were forgotten in the wider common bond. The lawyer virtually ordered Mahony to "sit in", till he gave the word.
Mahony's face paled under its top-dressing of dust and moisture. To Ocock's gross: "Well, it's your own look-out, confound you! entirely your own look-out," he returned a cool: "Certainly," then moved to one side and took up his stand in a corner of the hall, out of the way of the jostle and bustle, the constant going and coming that gave the hinges of the door no rest.
The lawyer had, for instance, got him finally out of "Porepunkahs" in the nick of time the reef had not proved as open to the day as was expected and pulled him off, in the process, another three hundred odd. Compared with Ocock's own takings, of course, his was a modest spoil; the lawyer had made a fortune, and was now one of the wealthiest men in Ballarat.
Not for the first time he found himself in the doctor's awkward quandary: how to be decently and humanly glad of a rise in the health-rate. He had often regretted having held to the half-hundred shares he had bought at Henry Ocock's suggestion; had often spent in fancy the sum they would have brought in, had he sold when they touched their highest figure.
At Ocock's Auction Rooms he bought a horsehair sofa to match his armchair, a strip of carpet, a bed, a washhand-stand and a looking-glass, and tacked up a calico curtain before the window.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking