side street were two-storied, dingy, jammed tightly together, each one exactly like the next.  The pavement was of stone, the roadway of some composite, hard as iron; roadway and pavement were overrun with children.  At the corner by a dead wall was a lamp-post.  Nearly opposite Nellie a group of excited women were standing in an open doorway.  They talked loudly, two or three at a time, addressing each other indiscriminately.  The children screamed and swore, quarrelled and played and fought, while a shrill-voiced mother occasionally took a hand in the diversion of the moment, usually to scold or cull some luckless offender.  The sunshine radiated that sickly heat which precedes rain.

Nellie stood there and waited for Ned.  She was 20 or so, tall and slender but well-formed, every curve of her figure giving promise of more luxurious development.  She was dressed in a severely plain dress of black stuff, above which a faint line of white collar could be seen clasping the round throat.  Her ears had been bored, but she wore no earrings.  Her brown hair was drawn away from her forehead and bound in a heavy braid on the back of her neck.  But it was her face that attracted one, a pale sad face that was stamped on every feature with the impress of a determined will and of an intense womanliness.  From the pronounced jaw that melted its squareness of profile in the oval of the full face to the dark brown eyes that rarely veiled themselves beneath their long-lashed lids, everything told that the girl possessed the indefinable something we call character.  And if there was in the drooping corners of her red lips a sternness generally unassociated with conceptions of feminine loveliness one forgot it usually in contemplating the soft attractiveness of the shapely forehead, dashed beneath by straight eyebrows, and of the pronounced cheekbones that crossed the symmetry of a Saxon face.  Mrs. Phillips was a drooping wearied woman but there was nothing drooping about Nellie and never could be.  She might be torn down like one of the blue gums under which she had drawn in the fresh air of her girlhood, but she could no more bend than can the tree which must stand erect in the fiercest storm or must go down altogether.  Pale she was, from the close air of the close street and close rooms, but proud she was as woman can be, standing erect in the door-way amid all this pandemonium of cries, waiting for Ned.  Ned was her old playmate, a Darling Downs boy, five years older to be sure, but her playmate in the old days, nevertheless, as lads who have no sisters are apt to be with admiring little girls who have no brothers.  Selectors’ children, both of them, from neighbouring farms, born above the frost line under the smelting Queensland sun, drifted hither and thither by the fitful gusts of Fate as are the paper-sailed ships that boys launch on flood water pools, meeting here in Sydney after long years of separation.  Now, Nellie was a dressmaker in a big city shop, and Ned a sun-burnt shearer to whom the great trackless West was home.  She thought of the old home sadly as she stood there waiting for him.