The writing of the letter to Lucy Woodrow was now indefinitely postponed, and Jim found himself reluctant to open the box containing Lucy’s locket.  When his hand fell upon it by chance he put it by hastily, as if it were just possible that the face in the trinket might force itself upon his attention.  He never lived to understand this fugitive idea, for the thoughts were cast aside just as hastily, and with an absurd touch of impatience.

The young man had given himself up to Aurora’s influence.  The plenitude and the ardour of her love carried him along; he felt at times like a twig in a torrent, but the sensation was luxurious, and another joy of life was with him.  He opened wide arms to it.  Once again he saw the world with new eyes, and for having despised and mistrusted it so found it the more adorable.  He squared his shoulders and experienced a curious sensation of physical growth and accrued manhood.  Two years ago he might have weighed his feelings for Aurora and hers for him, and sought out motives; to-day he went along the flow of life, unresisting, with a leaping heart, and had he been questioned would have said that not he but the world had changed.

Mike Burton watched the development of events in a judicial way, without offering any comment.  There had not been a waste month in his life for as long as he could remember.  In spite of his busy days and his Bush breeding, he had been much in touch with the humanities, and he knew men and women well enough to expect no startling surprises from them; but Jim was a curiosity.  With a certain robustness of character, no little knowledge, and considerable worldly wisdom in abstract matters, the younger man yet seemed to bring a boy’s mind to bear upon actualities, and excited himself absurdly over matters which, from Mike’s patriarchal point of view, were merely the expected events of existence—­the things that happen to all men, and about which no man need distress himself.  He had seen a good deal of the women of the camps, and thought he knew the types well.  He summed up Aurora to his own satisfaction:  ’Like an eel—­easy to catch, but hard to hold!’ Amongst other pleasant qualities, Mike had the comfortable human one of often being wrong in his estimates of men and women and things.  He expected the girl’s infatuation to wear itself out quickly, and meanwhile possessed his soul with patience, prospected here and there, tried new claims, and found a few payable and one rich before the summer came again; but he wanted to try the other rushes, and the winter passed without his having broached the matter to Done.