'Oh!'

'Aurora!'

'The devil you are? It's an infernal impertinence, then, let me tell you.'

'That Irish girl would tear hair like a mountain cat,' continued Mike serenely.

'You're wrong, Mike, quite wrong,' said Jim impressively. 'This girl is--well, absolutely different.'

Done found the trip to b.o.o.byalla very much longer than he had expected, but the mates reached the homestead at about two o'clock. The place was almost deserted. Two or three wolfish cattle-dogs ran from the huts, and barked at them in a half hearted kind of way; a black boy shouted from the shed, and two gins came to the kitchen door, watching them. On the shady side of the same structure a dilapidated, miserable-looking white man of about fifty lay in a drunken sleep, buzzed over by a swarm of flies. The dwelling-house was a wandering weather-board structure with shingle roofs and iron chimneys; a deep veranda, partly latticed, ran round three sides, and ebullient creepers of many kinds swarmed over the house at their own wild will. The homestead faced into a big garden spreading into an orchard, now green and gay with the verdancy and the blooms of spring.

'Didn't I tell you? Not a white man round but the motherless drunk there,' said Mike.

One of the cattle-dogs had returned to the side of the sleeper, and employed himself snapping at the greedy flies, yapping impatiently to keep them from the man's face.

'No boss sit down there, Mary?' said Mike, addressing the eider of the gins.

The aborigine grinned cheerfully. 'Boss him bin gone sit down longa Porkpine,' she said. 'Missus ride by Longabenna. Bill dam drunk, White feller all gone make it hole, catch plenty gold. Gib it 'bacca!'

Burton threw his half-plug of tobacco to the gin; she caught it deftly, the second one s.n.a.t.c.hed, and the two set up a shrill yabbering, like excited monkeys.

'Miss Woodrow?' said Jim interrogatively.

'Teachy missie longa garden,' answered the gin, with ill.u.s.trative pantomime.

'Better go and hunt her out,' Mike said. 'I'll find the black boy, and work him for drinks if possible.'

Done pa.s.sed through a side-gate into the garden, found his way to the main walk, and looked about him.

'Well?' called a voice from the veranda.

He turned quickly. Within a few feet of him, in the s.p.a.ce between the vines where the steps led up to the doorway, a little dark-eyed girl of about seven, the miniature of Mrs. Macdougal, peeped round her skirts at the stranger. Lucy did not recognise Jim in a moment.

'Lucy!' he said.

'Jim!' Her face crimsoned; she sprang down the steps, extending two hands.

He took both in his, and looked at her. She had changed and strengthened--he could see that. Evidently she had lived much in the sun; the pallor had gone from her face, and it had warmed to a tender olive-brown, pure and soft, deepening to a ruddier tint on the cheeks.

She was much stouter, too, and carried herself with more character. There was a swing in her movements, hinting at hearty exercises in the open.

She was looking at him, and saw a wonderful difference. There was a short, thick, youthful beard upon his chin, a slight moustache upon his lip, both heightening the Grecian quality of his face; his tan had taken a deeper tone; he was the picture of health and strength, she thought.

Done saw that she was greatly disturbed, and regretted having come upon her so suddenly. There was no questioning her delight; her colour came and went half a dozen times as they stood thus, hand in hand; her eyes were misty with tears, but she laughed through all.

'Well?' he queried.

'Oh, I am so glad to see you--so very glad!'

'And is it to be Jim and Lucy still?'

'Yes, to be sure. How changed you are! Come, come, sit down and talk.

Talk till my senses come back to me. I am bushed!' She laughed a little hysterically.

'I have startled you.'

'No, no, it's pure gladness--it is indeed. It was good of you to come.'

'You are changed, too. Have you stood to your determination to be happy?'

'I am not unhappy.' She had seated herself beside him, and pa.s.sed an arm about the shy child, of whom little more than one dark eye was visible, peeping at Jim from the other side, and yet that one eye recalled humorous impressions of Mrs. Donald Macdougal of b.o.o.byalla. He expected to see it start revolving coquettishly.

'You are stronger. You have grown,' he said.

'Yes, I ride a lot with the children. It is good for me. I love it. This life agrees with me well. But it is not only a change in you, it is a transformation. Why, you can laugh!'

'Come, come! I could always laugh.'

She shook her head. 'Not convincingly. You love the new land? You have prospered?'

'Yes,' he answered, 'I have had a wonderful spell of life.'

'And the people--you find you can like them?'

The question gave him rather a shock; he had to think a moment to recall her optimistic advice and his old frame of mind.

'Like is too feeble a word,' he said presently. 'The thought of them warms my heart.'

'Ah, that is good!' She clasped his hand impulsively. 'That is best of all. I was afraid you might cling to your mistrust, and shut the kindly people out of your life.'

'Before it was the people shut me out.'

'Are you sure?'

He had never doubted, now the question set him wondering for a minute. He looked at her again. Certainly she had developed observation, acuteness.

Or had he? Once more he wondered. He watched her with new interest. She was not so pretty as she had seemed on the Francis Cadman; the ethereality was gone, but Done liked her the better for it. He felt his whole physical being to be in sympathy with vital things, and, after all, how often the poets, in their rhapsodies on spirituelle and unearthly women, were merely rapturously apostrophizing the evidences of dissolution! He met her now without a doubt in his heart, with a soul free to respond to his natural emotions, and she filled him with delight.

Unconsciously he was wooing her--not with words, but with accents more eloquent, and the girl felt it instinctively, with a sense of triumph.

'I can't take my eyes off you,' he said. 'In what are you so different?'

She smiled pleasantly. 'I am dreadfully sunburnt; I am no longer thin; I do not brood.'

'No, no; it is a difference of spirit. Where is that constraint we felt?'

'The constraint was wholly with you.' She blushed again.

The kissing episode had been recalled to both. He laughed gaily, feeling very comfortable, quite forgetful of his mate.

'Yes, I was certainly a humourless, gloomy young fool he said.

'Only an unhappy boy,' she murmured, 'and my wonderful hero.' She, too, spoke as if it were a matter of long years ago, when she was a silly slip of a girl.