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Then began a long and strenuous struggle with his uncle, his aunt, and his cousins. The girls promised him a Maori wife, and to arouse his aversion to such a lot appeared before him in petticoats, their hair dishevelled, whereat he was struck with admiration and expressed a still keener desire to be gone. The boys characterised the proceeding strongly as ‘rotten,’ and suggested all manner of harrowing and degrading occupations, which they feigned to believe were preferable to the abandonment of the land of his birth. Mrs. Hernshaw spoke of the grief he was causing his uncle, who, she said, suspected that Geoffrey had taken his confidence as an indirect way of saying he did not care to support him any longer.

Geoffrey fairly laughed at the idea. ‘I should know myself an ungrateful scoundrel if such a thought had ever entered my mind,’ he said. ‘I want to go to New Zealand for my own personal gratification.’

‘Is there nothing behind all this? If it were only for a short time! But you do not say that.’

‘No, I do not say that; I don’t know how that may be.’

That was as far as he would go towards the possibility of a return.

Mr. Hernshaw’s objections were those of a man of the world. ‘I have always believed,’ he said once, ‘that the people who succeed in colonial life are the people who would succeed anywhere.’

‘Their opportunities may be greater there,’ Geoffrey suggested.

‘I should doubt it, except on special lines. The opportunities for a clever man in a city of four or