Well!...

He walked about, while the fiercest paroxysm racked him.  As some of us in our pain-torments rush to lotion or anodyne, he sought the soothing of the starry night, the cool darkness that had so often brought him peace.  To get away from the faintly audible tinkling of the shearers’ banjo and their songs, he strolled in the opposite direction, and that was towards the dark mass of the trees encircling her house—­her home, in which he had no part.  Mechanically he noted a garden gate open—­she had left it so—­open to the rabbits against which its section of the miles of wire-netting fencing the grounds had been so carefully provided, and he went forward to shut it.  Being there, he had a distant view of the big drawing-room windows, thrown up and letting out wide streams of light across the lawn.  And while he stood to gaze at them, picturing what within he could not see, he heard the piano—­Debbie playing.

And so she had an appreciative audience, although she did not know it.  Below her windows, out of the light, Jim—­poor old Jim!—­sat like a statue, his head thrown back, his eyes uplifted, tears running down his hairy, weather-beaten face.  It was the most exquisitely miserable hour of his life—­or so he thought.  He did not know what a highly favoured mortal he really was, in that his beautiful love-story was never to be spoiled by a happy ending.