tal than himself trod the earth.

Chapter VIII

Mahony remained at the Hotel till the following afternoon, then walked
to Geelong and took the steam-packet to Melbourne. The object of his
journey was to ask Mr. John Turnham's formal sanction to his marriage.
Polly accompanied him a little way on his walk. And whenever he looked
back he saw her standing fluttering her handkerchief--a small, solitary
figure on the bare, red road.

He parted from her with a sense of leaving his most precious possession
behind, so close had words made the tie. On the other hand, he was not
sorry to be out of range for a while of the Beamish family's banter.
This had set in, the evening before, as soon as he and Polly returned
to the house--pacing the deck of the little steamer, he writhed anew at
the remembrance. Jokes at their expense had been cracked all through
supper: his want of appetite, for instance, was the subject of a dozen
crude insinuations; and this, though everyone present knew that he had
eaten a hearty meal not two hours previously; had been kept up till he
grew stony and savage, and Polly, trying hard not to mind but red to
the rims of her ears, slipped out of the room. Supper over, Mrs.
Bearnish announced in a loud voice that the verandah was at the
disposal of the "turtle-doves." She no doubt expected them to bill and
coo in public, as Purdy and Matilda had done. On edge at the thought,
he drew Polly into the comparative seclusion of the garden. Here they
strolled up and down, their promenade bounded at the lower end by the
dense-leaved arbour under which they had first met. In its screening
shadow he took the kiss he had then been generous enough to forgo.

"I think I loved you, Polly, directly I saw you."

In the distance a clump of hills rose steep and bare from the waste
land by the sea's edge--he could see them at this moment as he leant
over the taffrail: with the sun going down behind them they were the
colour of smoked glass. Last night they had been white with moonlight,
which lay spilled out upon them like milk. Strange old hills! Standing
there unchanged, unshaken, from time immemorial, they made the troth
that had been plighted under their shield seem pitifully frail. And
yet.... The vows which Polly and he had found so new, so wonderful;
were not these, in truth, as ancient as the hills themselves, and as
undying? Countless generations of human lovers had uttered them. The
lovers passed, but the pl