rtainly she had developed observation, acuteness.
Or had he? Once more he wondered. He watched her with new interest. She
was not so pretty as she had seemed on the Francis Cadman; the
ethereality was gone, but Done liked her the better for it. He felt his
whole physical being to be in sympathy with vital things, and, after all,
how often the poets, in their rhapsodies on spirituelle and unearthly
women, were merely rapturously apostrophizing the evidences of
dissolution! He met her now without a doubt in his heart, with a soul
free to respond to his natural emotions, and she filled him with delight.
Unconsciously he was wooing her--not with words, but with accents more
eloquent, and the girl felt it instinctively, with a sense of triumph.

'I can't take my eyes off you,' he said. 'In what are you so different?'

She smiled pleasantly. 'I am dreadfully sunburnt; I am no longer thin; I
do not brood.'

'No, no; it is a difference of spirit. Where is that constraint we felt?'

'The constraint was wholly with you.' She blushed again.

The kissing episode had been recalled to both. He laughed gaily, feeling
very comfortable, quite forgetful of his mate.

'Yes, I was certainly a humourless, gloomy young fool he said.

'Only an unhappy boy,' she murmured, 'and my wonderful hero.' She, too,
spoke as if it were a matter of long years ago, when she was a silly slip
of a girl.

'And is there no hero now?'

'I have found no other.'

'Ah, that is something! Do you still pray for the old one, Lucy?'

'But you have no faith in prayers.'

'I may have in the prayer.'

'Well, then, I do. You see, you can never be wholly undeserving in my
eyes.' With Lucy, as with many girls in whom gratitude is the precursor
of love, most of the sentiments due to the kindling affection were
credited to gratitude.

'You have not blamed me for neglecting to write.'

'No; I have had no anxiety for some time. I knew where you were and how
you were.'

'You knew!'

'I knew that you had made friends, that you were on pay dirt at Diamond
Gully, and that the good Australian sunshine had warmed your heart.' She
smiled mysteriously.

'Ah, I know,' he said after a moment's thought--'Ryder.'

'Yes, Mr. Walter Ryder. He wrote me that he had come across you at
Diamond Gully. He seemed quite interested in you.'

'And I am interested by him. He is a peculiar personality.'

'Yes, so flippant; and behind it all you seem to feel something
iron-lik