Ned hardly believed his ears or his eyes, either.  He had not seen Nellie like this before.  She had been grave and rather stern.  Only at the gate he had thought he detected in her voice a bitterness which answered well to his own bitter heartache; he had thought he saw on her face the convulsive suppression of intense emotion.  Certainly this very day she had shown him the horrors of Sydney and taught him, as if by magic, the misery of living.  Now, she laughed lightly and played a trick with the quickness of a thoughtless school girl.  Besides, how did it happen that she was so at home in this house of well-to-do people, and so familiar with this man of a cultured class?  Ned did not express his thoughts in such phrases of course, but that was the effect of them.  He had laughed, but he was still sad and sick at heart and somehow these pleasantries jarred on him.  It looked as if there were some secret understanding certainly, some bond that he could not distinguish, between the girl of the people and this courteous gentleman.  Nellie had told him simply that the Strattons were “interested in the Labour movement” and were very nice, but Stratton spoke of her as “one of the family” and she turned out his gas and locked one of his own doors in his face.  If it was a secret society, well and good, no matter how desperate its plan.  But why did they laugh and joke and play tricks?  He was not in the humour.  For the time his soul abhorred what seemed to him frippery.  He sought intuitively to find relief in action and he began impatiently to look for it here.

“Hurry, Nellie!” cried Stratton.  “Coffee’s nearly ready.”

“You won’t touch me?” answered her merry voice.

“No, we’ll forgive you this once, but look out for the next time.”

She opened the door forthwith and stepped out quickly.  Ned caught a glimpse of a large bedroom through the doorway.  She had taken off her hat and gloves and smoothed the hair that lay on her neck in a heavy plait.  At the collar of the plain black dress that fell to her feet over the curving lines of her supple figure she had placed a red rose, half blown.  She was tall and straight and graceful, more than beautiful in her strong fresh womanhood, as much at home in such a house as this as in the wretched room where he had watched her sewing slop-clothes that morning.  His aching heart went out towards her in a burst of unspoken feeling which he did not know at the time to be Love.

“Mrs. Stratton always puts a flower for me.  She loves roses.”  So she said to Ned, seeing him looking astonishedly at her.  Then she slipped one hand inside the arm that Stratton bent towards her, and took hold of Ned’s arm with the other.  Stratton turned down the gas.  Linked thus together the three went cautiously down the dim passage hall-way, towards the glass door through one side of which coloured light came.

“Anybody particular here?” asked Nellie.

“That’s a nice question,” retorted Stratton.  “Geisner is here, if you call him ‘anybody particular.’”