in the empty breakfast-room; her hands were
listlessly dropped and she was lost in an unhappy reverie.

"Jane," he cried, "forgive me. You gave me a breakfast in Paradise this
morning. I shall never forget it. Good-bye, love." He would have kissed
her, but she turned her head aside and did not answer him a word. Yet
she was longing for his kiss and his words were music in her heart. But
that is the way with women; they wound themselves six times out of the
half-dozen wrongs of which they complain.

The next moment she was sorry, Oh, so sorry, that she had sent the man
she loved to an exhausting day of thought and work with an aching pain
in his heart and his mental powers dulled. She had taken all joy and
hope out of his life and left him to fight his way through the hard,
noisy, cruel hours with anxiety and fear his only companions.

"I am so sorry! I am so sorry!" she whispered. "What was the use of
making him happy for fifty-nine minutes, and then undoing it all in the
sixtieth? I wish--I wish----" and she had a swift sense of wrong and
shame in uttering her wish, and so let it die unspoken on her closed
lips.

At the park entrance John stood still a minute; his desire was to put
Bendigo to his utmost speed and quickly find out the lonely world he
knew of beyond Hatton and Harlow. There he could mingle his prayer with
the fresh winds of heaven and the cries of beasts and birds seeking
their food from God. His flesh had been well satisfied, but Oh how
hungry was his soul! It longed for a renewed sense of God's love and it
longed for some word of assurance from Jane. Then there flashed across
his memory the rumor of war and the clouds in the far west gathering
volume and darkness every day. No, he could not run away; he must find
in the fulfilling of his duty whatever consolation duty could give him,
and he turned doggedly to the mill and his mail.

Once more as he lifted his mail, he had that fear of a letter from Harry
which had haunted him more or less for some months. He shuffled the
letters at once, searching for the delicate, disconnected writing so
familiar to him and hardly knew whether its absence was not as
disquieting as its presence would have been.

The mail being attended to, he sent for Greenwood and spoke to him about
the likelihood of war and its consequences. Jonathan proved to be quite
well informed on this subject. He said he had been on the point of
speaking about buying all the cotton they c