“Of course he can’t help it, Nellie,” agreed Ned.  “They’re mostly mortgaged up to the neck like the shopkeepers and squeeze us partly to keep afloat themselves.  It’s the system, not the squatters personally.  A lot of them are decent enough, taking them off their runs and some are decent even on their runs.  Even the squatters aren’t all bad.  I don’t wish them any harm individually but just the same we’re fighting them and they’re fighting us and what I feel sorest about is that it’s just because the New Unionism is teaching our chaps to think and to be better and to have ideas that they are trying so hard to down it.”

“They don’t know any better,” repeated Nellie.

“That’s what Geisner says, I recollect.  I mind how he said they’d try sending us to prison here in Australia.  They’re beginning soon.”

They were right at the point now.

“There’s only one thing I’d like to know first, Nellie.”

“What is it, Ned?” she asked, unconsciously, absorbed in her fear for him.

CHAPTER III.

A WOMAN’S WHIM.

“Nellie!”

It was a husky whisper.  His throat was parched, his lips dry, his mouth also.  His heart thumped, thumped, thumped, so that it sickened him.  He shook nervously.  His face twitched.  He felt burning hot; then deadly cold.  He turned his hat slowly round and round in his trembling fingers.

It was as though he had turned woman.  He did not even feel passion.  He dared not look at her.  He could feel her there.  He did not desire as he had desired so often to snatch her to him, to crush her in his arms, to smother her with kisses, to master her.  All his strength fled from him in an indescribable longing.

He had dreamed of this moment, often and often.  He had rehearsed it in his mind a thousand times, when the reins dropped on his horse’s neck, when he lay sleepless on the ground, even as he chatted to his mates.  He had planned what to say, how to say it, purposing to break down her stubborn will with the passionate strength of his love for her, with mad strong words, with subtle arguments.  He had seen her hesitating in his dreaming, had seen the flush come and go on her cheeks, her bosom heaving beneath the black dress he knew so well.  He had made good his wooing with the tender violence that women forgive for love’s sake, had caught her and kissed her till her kisses answered and till she yielded him her troth and pledged herself his wife.  So he had dreamed in his folly.  And now he stood there like a whipped child, pleading huskily: 

“Nellie!”