e up Sydney.

Intuitively, both avoided talking of the topics that before had engaged
them and that still engrossed their thoughts. For a while they chatted on
indifferent matters, but gradually relapsed into silence, rarely broken.
The impression of the morning walk, of Mrs. Somerville's poor room, of
Nellie's stuffy street, came with full force to Ned's mind. What he saw
only stamped it deeper and deeper.

When, in a bus, they rode through the suburbs of the wealthy, past
shrubberied mansions and showy villas, along roads where liveried
carriages, drawn by high-stepping horses, dashed by them, he felt himself
in the presence of the fat man who jingled sovereigns, of the lean man
whose slender fingers reached north to the Peak Downs and south to the
Murray, filching everywhere from the worker's hard-earned wage. When in
the tram they were carried with clanging and jangling through endless
rows of houses great and small, along main thoroughfares on either side
of which crowded side-streets extended like fish-bones, over less crowded
districts where the cottages were generally detached or semi-detached and
where pleasant homely houses were thickly sprinkled, oven here he
wondered how near those who lived in happier state were to the life of
the slum, wondered what struggling and pinching and scraping was going on
behind the half-drawn blinds that made homes look so cosy.

What started him on this idea particularly was that, in one train, a
grey-bearded propertied-looking man who sat beside him was grumbling to a
spruce little man opposite about the increasing number of empty houses.

"You can't wonder at it," answered the spruce little man. "When the
working classes aren't prospering everybody feels it but the exporters.
Wages are going down and people are living two families in a house where
they used to live one in a house, or living in smaller houses."

"Oh! Wages are just as high. There's been too much building. You building
society men have overdone the thing."

"My dear sir!" declared the spruce little man. "I'm talking from facts.
My society and every other building society is finding it out. When men
can't get as regular work it's the same thing to them as if wages were
coming down. The number of surrenders we have now is something appalling.
Working men have built expecting to be able to pay from 6s. to 10s. and
12s. a week to the building societies, and every year more and more are
finding out they can't d