“I shall be always welcome to her if I can bring myself to talk about that detestable country.  Well, I will grind my tongue down to it.  She shall not be able to do without my chat; that shall be the beginning; the middle shall be different; the end shall be just the opposite.  The sea is between him and her.  I am here with opportunity, resolution and money.  I will have her!”

The next morning his mother said to him: 

“John, do you think to go to-day?”

“Where, mother?”

“The journey you spoke of.”

“What journey?”

“Among the mines.”

“Not I.”

“You have changed your mind, then?”

“What, didn’t you see I was joking?”

“No!” (very dryly.)

Soon after this little dialogue Dame Meadows proposed to end her visit and return home.  Her son yielded a cheerful assent.  She went gravely and quietly back to her little cottage.

Meadows had determined to make himself necessary to Susan Merton.  He brought a woman’s cunning to bear against a woman’s; for the artifice to which his strong will bent his supple talent is one that many women have had the tact and temporary self-denial to carry out, but not one man in a hundred.

Men try to beat an absent rival by sneering at him, etc.  By which means the asses make their absent foe present to her mind and enlist the whole woman in his defense.

But Meadows was no ordinary man.  Susan had given his quick intelligence a glimpse of a way to please her.  He looked at the end, and crushed his will down to the thorny means.

Twice a week he called on the Mertons, and much of his talk was Australia.  Susan was grateful.  To hear of the place where George would soon be was the nearest approach she could make to hearing of George.

As for Meadows, he gained a great point, but he went through tortures on the way.  He could not hide from himself why he was so welcome; and many a time as he rode home from the Mertons he resolved never to return there, but he took no more oaths; it had cost him so much to keep the last; and that befell which might have been expected, after a while, the pleasure of being near the woman he loved, of being distinguished by her and greeted with pleasure however slight, grew into a habit and a need.

Achilles was a man of steel, but he had a vulnerable part; and iron natures like John Meadows have often one spot in their souls where they are far tenderer than the universal dove-eyed, and weaker than the omnipotent.  He never spoke a word of love to Susan, he knew it would spoil all; and she, occupied with another’s image, and looking upon herself as confessedly belonging to another, never suspected the deep passion that filled this man’s heart.  But if an observer of nature had accompanied John Meadows on market-day he might have seen—­diagnostics.