“Ha ha!  You, Sybylla, thought this!  You, a chit in your teens, an ugly, poor, useless, unimportant, little handful of human flesh, and, above, or rather below, all, a woman—­only a woman!  It would indeed be a depraved and forsaken man who would need your services as a stay and support!  Ha ha!  The conceit of you!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Because?

The Beechams were vacating Five-Bob almost immediately—­before Christmas.  Grannie, aunt Helen, and uncle Jay-Jay went down to say good-bye to the ladies, who were very heartbroken about being uprooted from Five-Bob, but they approved of their nephew settling things at once and starting on a clean sheet.  They intended taking up their residence—­hiding themselves, they termed it—­in Melbourne.  Harold would be detained in Sydney some time during the settling of his affairs, after which he intended to take anything that turned up.  He had been offered the management of Five-Bob by those in authority, but could not bring himself to accept managership where he had been master.  His great desire, now that Five-Bob was no longer his, was to get as far away from old associations as possible.

He had seen his aunts off, superintended the muster of all stock on the place, dismissed all the female and most of the male employees, and surrendered the reins of government, and as Harold Augustus Beecham, boss of Five-Bob, on Monday, the 21st of December 1896, was leaving the district for ever.  On Sunday, the 20th of December, he came to bid us good-bye and to arrive at an understanding with me concerning what I had said to him the Sunday before.  Grannie, strange to say, never suspected that there was likely to be anything between us.  Harold was so undemonstrative, and had always come and gone as he liked at Caddagat:  she overlooked the possibility of his being a lover, and in our intercourse allowed us almost the freedom of sister and brother or cousins.

On this particular afternoon, after we had talked to grannie for a little while, knowing that he wished to interview me, I suggested that he should come up the orchard with me and get some gooseberries.  Without demur from anybody we set off, and were scarcely out of hearing before Harold asked me had I really meant what I said.

“Certainly,” I replied.  “That is, if you really care for me, and think it wise to choose me of all my sex.”

Ere he put it in words I read his answer in the clear brown eyes bent upon me.

“Syb, you know what I feel and would Eke, but I think it would be mean of me to allow you to make such a sacrifice.”

I knew I was not dealing with a booby, but with a sensible clear-sighted man, and so studied to express myself in a way which would not for an instant give him the impression that I was promising to marry him because—­what I don’t know and it doesn’t matter much, but I said: