‘I am going, Joy,’ he whispered later.

‘Not here,’ she said, taking his arm.  ‘Outside.’

They passed out together, and stood by the big tree in which Mrs. Ben’s stock was hidden.

‘Good-bye!’ he said.

‘It’s hard!’ She put her hands upon his shoulders, and her voice trembled.  ’I’ve been pretty badly in love, Jimmy.  Remember that in kindness, Won’t you?  It seems to excuse a good deal.  It might even excuse a poor colleen makin’ the fool an’ all iv herself.’  The brogue sounded deeply pathetic.  ‘A kiss,’ she whispered quickly.  ’One of the old kisses, dear.’

As he bent down to her his cheek crushed a tear on hers, and he was touched deeply.  The kiss was long and tender; as the kiss of a man for whom there was only one woman in the world, and she not the one being kissed, it was emphatically successful.  It drew a deep sigh from poor Aurora, and thrilled Jim with not a little of the old rapture.

‘Good-bye!’ she said; but her fingers clung to him.

‘Good-bye!’ he repeated, taking her hands in his.

‘Have you the little heart of gold?’ she asked.

‘It’s here.’  He drew it from his pocket.

‘Give it back to me.’

He pressed it into her hand, kissed her cheek, and hurried away.  Aurora stood for some minutes turning the nugget over and over in her fingers; then she moved to the shanty door and looked in, but turned away with a muttered exclamation, and went to the entrance of the back tent.

‘You’ll have to attend to those brutes in there,’ she said to Mary Kyley.  ‘I’ve had as much as I can stand for one night.’  She threw herself upon her bed, and hid her face in the pillow.

‘Has he gone, dear?’ asked Mrs. Kyley, laying a big but gentle hand upon the girl.

Aurora nodded her bead in the pillow, and after looking at her in silence for a moment, Mary went in to attend to her customers, shaking her head sadly as she went.  When she peeped into the back tent again an hour later Aurora still lay face downwards upon the bed.

‘Are you asleep, Aurora?’ whispered Mrs. Ben.  ‘No!’ answered the girl fiercely.  ‘For God’s sake, don’t bother me!’

Mrs. Ben went away again, sadder than before.

‘Oh, the men, the men!’ murmured the wise woman.  ’To think of the good women wasted on them, and the chits they’re often wasted on!’

Jim Done enjoyed the tramp to Simpson’s Ranges.  The weather was fine, the country was picturesque, and the company highly congenial.  He liked the Peetrees better in his present mood, and his interest in the popular movement that was to culminate at Eureka was deepening daily.  He had even addressed a small meeting of miners on the subject of the rights of the people, and he was no pusillanimous reformer.  He declared the diggers had reached that point at which toleration meant meanness of spirit.  The thought of civil war was appalling, but not so much so as the degradation of a nation in which the manhood plodded meekly under the whip, like driven cattle yoked to their load.