evinced the
fact that she had a temper when she was reminded that certain of the
young men in the district had lost their hearts to her, and had left the
neighbourhood because of their inability to repair that loss. Not that
she objected to the first part of the indictment; it was rather
pleasant, from her point of view, to have the command of the entire
youth of the district. What she objected to was the going away of
individual units from Birralong, just because she did not see fit to
deny herself the pleasure of the society of all the other youths in
exchange for that of just one. It always happened in that manner;
always the departure of some youth for the western stations, the
northern gold-fields, the coastal towns, or the droving routes, had been
preceded by one, sometimes two, and sometimes more, interviews with her,
in which, as she usually told them, they made her "feel tired." Always
except once. Tony Taylor had gone off and had hardly wished her
good-bye, and Tony and she had been as brother and sister, only more so,
since the day when they first met and began to climb through all the
standards of the State-school education, beginning at the very lowest of
the grades, together.

Tony used to ride in to the school in those days, for Birralong was in
its infancy and the school was only just opened. Taylor's Flat, the
selection where he lived, was a dozen miles away, and Tony used to come
and have dinner with her and her mother and father. He used to ride in
bare-back on a big old splodgy dray-horse named Tom, which had been
worked in the dray and at the plough until there was only jog-trot
servility left in him. But Tony--clad in a pair of knickerbockers cut
down from a pair of Taylor's moleskins, a flannel shirt with the sleeves
rolled up and the neck innocent of a button, with neither shoes nor
stockings on his brown little feet and legs, and with an old soft felt
hat, discarded by the elder Taylor, and consequently as many sizes too
big for Tony as his knickerbockers were--was a proud boy as he rode
through the township every day to and from school, his little legs
barely reaching across the broad back of the old dray-horse. He was the
only one who rode in, and that, together with his eight years and quick
wits, made him a hero in the mind of the Irish-named, Saxon-haired
daughter of the schoolmaster.

There had been a community of interests between them from those days of
irresponsible childhood; and wh