“But it doesn’t cost tramps much for expenses,” she took the thought away from him.  “Is that why you tramp?”

He nodded and licked his lips.

“Mamma says it’s too bad that men must tramp to look for work.  But there’s lots of work now in the country.  All the farmers in the valley are trying to get men.  Have you been working?”

He shook his head, angry with himself that he should feel shame at the confession when his savage reasoning told him he was right in despising work.  But this was followed by another thought.  This beautiful little creature was some man’s child.  She was one of the rewards of work.

“I wish I had a little girl like you,” he blurted out, stirred by a sudden consciousness of passion for paternity.  “I’d work my hands off.  I ...  I’d do anything.”

She considered his case with fitting gravity.

“Then you aren’t married?”

“Nobody would have me.”

“Yes they would, if....”

She did not turn up her nose, but she favoured his dirt and rags with a look of disapprobation he could not mistake.

“Go on,” he half-shouted.  “Shoot it into me.  If I was washed—­if I wore good clothes—­if I was respectable—­if I had a job and worked regular—­if I wasn’t what I am.”

To each statement she nodded.

“Well, I ain’t that kind,” he rushed on.

“I’m no good.  I’m a tramp.  I don’t want to work, that’s what.  And I like dirt.”

Her face was eloquent with reproach as she said, “Then you were only making believe when you wished you had a little girl like me?”

This left him speechless, for he knew, in all the deeps of his new-found passion, that that was just what he did want.

With ready tact, noting his discomfort, she sought to change the subject.

“What do you think of God?” she asked.

“I ain’t never met him.  What do you think about him?”

His reply was evidently angry, and she was frank in her disapproval.

“You are very strange,” she said.  “You get angry so easily.  I never saw anybody before that got angry about God, or work, or being clean.”

“He never done anything for me,” he muttered resentfully.  He cast back in quick review of the long years of toil in the convict camps and mines.  “And work never done anything for me neither.”

An embarrassing silence fell.

He looked at her, numb and hungry with the stir of the father-love, sorry for his ill temper, puzzling his brain for something to say.  She was looking off and away at the clouds, and he devoured her with his eyes.  He reached out stealthily and rested one grimy hand on the very edge of her little dress.  It seemed to him that she was the most wonderful thing in the world.  The quail still called from the coverts, and the harvest sounds seemed abruptly to become very loud.  A great loneliness oppressed him.

“I’m ...  I’m no good,” he murmured huskily and repentantly.