ng herself to speak to the only one whose sympathy
she really wanted, but whom she did not want to know it.

"I hardly knew what to do when they told me," he went on, looking at her
with eyes that she glanced into once and then avoided--sympathy, love,
and tenderness were too manifest in them for her to look again without
revealing what she, in the perversity of her feminine way, still wanted
to hide. "I didn't know what to make of it when they told me you were
here, till Nellie Murray said I should ride over to see."

It came to her, with a jealous little twinge, that after all the haste
he had shown in riding had been prompted by another girl; and in the
midst of her battle with feelings realized and feelings unrealized, the
struggle between the important and the unimportant, Ailleen, as a woman,
naturally jumped at the unimportant, and clung to it.

"That was very good of her. I'm glad you had her advice. Won't you sit
down?"

The words were as foreign as they well could be to what was in her
heart, but they relieved the situation for the moment, and saved her
from showing what she really meant.

"Why didn't you go to the Flat?" he asked, not heeding her words;
"mother would do anything for you, and father too--or to the Murrays, or
anywhere but here? Won't you come now? Mother wants you to come to the
Flat, and every one in Birralong----"

"I promised before----" and her lip quivered for a moment--"to come to
Mrs. Dickson. She asked me. I don't want to--offend any one, but--she is
so kind to me, and she's blind too, poor creature, and all alone."

"But, Ailleen----" he began, and stopped, looking hard at her face,
turned half away from him in her anxiety to avoid meeting his glance.
"We've found gold," he went on presently, after a few moments' silence.
"Not much, but still enough to--enough for us. When I've got
enough--when I come back--after this trip--if--I----"

He was floundering along, struggling vainly to put just one simple
little sentiment into a simple little sentence, and drifting more and
more into confusion and away from what he wanted to say. What that was
she was quite well aware, and also was aware what reply she would make
to it when once it was said; but for the present, with eternal feminine
perversity, she did not want it said, so she saw an imagined rider
across the paddock, and exclaimed--

"Is that Willy Dickson over there?"

Tony looked, half angrily.

"It isn't anybody," he sai