e not
changed; you are beautiful, as you always were."

The moment was crucial. He stepped towards her, but her eyes held him
back. He hoped that she would speak, but she only smiled sadly. He
waited, but, in the waiting, hope faded, and he only said, at last, in a
voice of new resolve grown out of dead expectancy: "Your brother--is he
well?"

"I hope so," she somewhat painfully replied. "Is he in Australia?"

"Yes. I have not seen him for years, but he is here." As if a thought
had suddenly come to him, he stepped nearer, and made as if he would
speak; but the words halted on his lips, and he turned away again. She
glided to his side and touched his arm. "I am glad that you trust me,"
she faltered.

"There is no more that need be said," he answered. And now, woman-like,
denying, she pitied, too. "If I ever can, shall--shall I send for you to
tell you all?" she murmured.

"You remember I told you that the world had but one place for me, and
that was by your side; that where you are, Barbara--"

"Hush, oh hush!" she interrupted gently. "Yes, I remember everything."

"There is no power can alter what is come of Heaven," he said, smiling
faintly.

She looked with limpid eyes upon him as he bowed over her hand, and she
spoke with a sweet calm: "God be with you, Louis."

Strange as it may seem, John Osgood did not tell his sisters and his
family of this romance which he had brought to the vivid close of a
first act. He felt the more so because Louis Bachelor had said no word
about it, but had only pressed his hand again and again--that he was
somehow put upon his honour, and he thought it a fine thing to stand on
a platform of unspoken compact with this gentleman of a social school
unfamiliar to him; from which it may be seen that cattle-breeding and
bullock-driving need not make a man a boor. What his sisters guessed
when they found that Barbara Golding and the visitor were old friends is
another matter; but they could not pierce their brother's reserve on the
point.

No one at Wandenong saw the parting between the two when Louis Bachelor,
his task with the telescope ended, left again for the coast; but indeed
it might have been seen by all men, so outwardly formal was it, even as
their brief conversations had been since they met again. But is it not
known by those who look closely upon the world that there is nothing so
tragic as the formal?

John Osgood accompanied his friend to the sea, but the name of Barb