land on the island, as he wished to sketch there. But he
had not been much about the house or the yards, and I had not seen
him. And then, one late afternoon, when I had arrived at the
milking-yards a few minutes before the others of the milking gang, I
stood with two pails in my right hand, leaning over the slip-rails at the
very spot upon which I had caught my first glimpse of Ted at St.
Peter's. I was thinking of that Sunday when I had recognised his broad
shoulders, and recalling the thrill that recognition had brought me.

The romantic hazardousness of life had for some considerable time now
made its appeal felt by me. It seemed infinitely curious and
interesting to me that I and my father ever should have known Ted
intimately, as one who shared our curious life on the _Livorno_; Ted
who was born and bred there in Werrina; we who came there across
thousands of miles of ocean from the world's far side, from Putney,
from places whose names Ted had never heard. And then that I should
have walked down to that milking-yard with my pails, and, so to say,
stumbled upon Ted, after his long wanderings in Queensland, where at
this moment he was probably wandering again, hundreds of miles away
and, possibly, thinking of me, of that same milking-yard, of these
identical slip-rails and splintery grey fence. A wonderful and
mysterious business, this life in the great world, I thought; and with
that I threw up my left hand to lift the rails down.

'Oh, hold on! Don't move! Stay as you were a minute!'

I jumped half out of my skin as these words, apparently spoken in my
very ear, reached me; and, wheeling abruptly round, I saw a man
wearing a very large grey felt hat, and holding pencils and a paper
block in his hands, peering at me from a little wooded hummock at the
end of the cowshed. The skin about his eyes was all puckered up, he
held a pencil cross-wise between his white teeth, and was shaking his
head from side to side as though very much put about over something.

'What a pity! It's gone now,' he said, as he strode down the slope
towards me.

He clearly was disappointed about something; but yet I thought that
never since the days when my father was with me had I heard any one
speak more pleasantly, or seen any one smile in kindlier fashion.
Later, I realised that no one I had met since my father's death
possessed anything resembling the sort of manner, address, intonation,
or mental attitude of this Mr. Rawlence. I ha