They stood face to face looking into each other’s eyes.  Unflinchingly she offered up her own heart and his on the altar of her ideal.

He read on her set lips the unalterability of her determination.  It was on his tongue to suggest that it was easy to compromise, but there was that about her which checked him.  Above all things there was a naturalness about her, an absence of artificiality, the emanation of a strong and vigorous womanliness.  The very freedom of her speech was purity itself.  The dark places of life had been bared to her and she did not conceal the fact or minimise it but she spoke of it as something outside of herself, as not affecting her excepting that it roused in her an intense sympathy.  She was indeed the barefooted woman in her conception of morality, in her frankness and in her strong emotions untainted by the gangrene of a rotting civilisation.  To suggest to her that fruitless love, that barren marriage, which destroys the soul of France and is spreading through Australia, would be to speak a strange language to her.  He could say nothing.  He was seized with a desire to get away from her.

“Good-bye!” he said, holding out his hand.  She took it in both her own.

“Ned!” she cried.  “We part friends, don’t we?  If there is a man in the world who could make me change my mind, it’s you.  Wherever you go I shall be thinking of you and all life through I shall be the same.  You have only to let me know and there’s nothing possible I wouldn’t do for you gladly.  We are friends, are we not?  Mates?  Brother and sister?”

Brother and sister!  The spirit moved in Ned’s hot heart at the words.  Geisner’s words came to him, nerving him.

“No!” he answered.  “Friends?  Yes.  Mates?  Yes.  Brother and sister?  No, never.  I don’t feel able to talk now.  You’re like a thorn bush in front of me that it’s no use rushing at.  But I’m not satisfied.  You’re wrong somewhere and I’m right and the right thing is to love when Love comes even if we’re to die next minute.  I’m going away and I may come back and I mayn’t but if I do you’ll see my way.  I shall think it out and show you.  Why, Nellie, I’m a different man already since you kissed me.  You and I together, why, we’d straighten things out if they were a thousand times as crooked.  What couldn’t we do, you and me?  And we’ll do it yet, Nellie.  When I come back you’ll have me and we two will give things such a shaking that they’ll never be the same again after we’ve got through with them.  Now, goodbye!  I’ll come back if it’s years and years, and you’ll wait for me, I know.  Good-bye, till then.”

She felt her feet leave the ground as he lifted her to him in a hug that made her ribs ache for a week, felt his willing lips on her passive ones, felt his long moustache, his warm breath, his reviving passion.  Then she found herself standing alone, quivering and pulsating, watching him as he walked away with the waddling walk of the horseman.