To this Ethel Ormiston sent no answer; but reflected “And what consideration is due to me? for you are my only lover.”

For a while Bob thought of enlisting, and then of earning an honest wage as a farm-labourer; but rejected both notions, because his training had not taught him that independence is better than respectability—­yea, than much broadcloth.  It was not that he hankered after the fleshpots, but that he had no conception of a world without fleshpots.  In the end his father came to him and said—­

“Will you give up this girl?”

And Bob answered—­

“I’m sorry, father, but I can’t.”

“Very well.  Rather than see this shame brought on the family, I will send you out to Australia.  I have written to my friend Morris, at Ballawag, New South Wales, three hundred miles from Sydney, and he is ready to take you into his office.  You have broken my heart and your mother’s, and you must go.”

And Bob—­this man of twenty-one or more—­obeyed his father in this, and went.  I can almost forgive him, knowing how the filial habit blinds a man.  But I cannot forgive the letter he wrote to Miss Ormiston—­whom he wished to make his wife, please remember.  Nevertheless she forgave him.  She had found another situation, and was working on.  Her parents were dead.

Five years passed, and Bob’s mother died—­twelve years, and his father died also, leaving him the lion’s share of the money.  During this time Bob had worked away at Ballawag and earned enough to set up as lawyer on his own account.  But because a man cannot play fast and loose with the self-will that God gave him and afterwards expect to do much in the world, he was a moderately unsuccessful man still when the inheritance dropped in.  It gave him a fair income for life.  When the letter containing the news reached him, he left the office, walked back to his house, and began to think.  Then he unlocked his safe and took out Ethel Ormiston’s letters.  They made no great heap; for of late their correspondence had dwindled to an annual exchange of good wishes at Christmas.  She was still earning her livelihood as a governess.

Bob thought for a week, and then wrote.  He asked Ethel Ormiston to come out and be his wife.  You will observe that the old curse still lay on him.  A man—­even a poor one—­that was worth kicking would have gone and fetched her; and Bob had plenty of money.  But he asked her to come out and begged her to cable “Yes” or “No.”

She cabled “Yes.”  She would start within the month from Plymouth, in the sailing-ship Grimaldi.  She chose a sailing-ship because it was cheaper.

So Bob travelled down to Sydney to welcome his bride.  He stepped on the Grimaldi’s deck within five minutes of her arrival, and asked if a Miss Ormiston were on board.  There advanced a middle-aged woman, gaunt, wrinkled and unlovely—­not the woman he had chosen, but the woman he had made.