And she was very grateful to him.
Mr. Dalrymple, meanwhile left town by an evening train, and travelled night and day until he reached his home in the Queensland wilderness, where, being human—and very much so, too—he unloosed his heart from the restraints that he had put upon it, and railed at ease over the injustices of fate in the very strongest language.
"Why should I have done it?" he demanded of his ancient friend and comrade as they lounged in restful attitudes under the grass-thatched verandah of their humble little house, smoking the pipe of peace in the cool of the summer day. "Why should I have given her up to him? What right has he to keep her, while I am lonely for the rest of my days? He has not the shadow of a right. She doesn't belong to him, and she never will. There is no binding force in any other contract that is entered into by fraud and false pretences; why should there be in this which she has been dragged into, and which deprives her as well as me, of all the flower and sweetness of her life? It is a monstrous sacrifice—and as immoral as it is monstrous.
"It isn't as if we had no end of years, no end of lives to throw away. Suppose, ages hence, if we should survive, with our human nature, and I, for one, don't want to survive without it—and we look back upon this precious bit of certain happiness that we might have had, and see that we voluntarily gave up the whole of it merely because of a wretched little paper law—a miserable little conventional prejudice—what shall we think of ourselves then? We shall say that we did not deserve a gift that we did not know how to value."
"Rave away," said Mr. Gordon. "It will do you good. All the same, you know, as well as I do, that it would be impossible for you to do less or more than you have done."
Of course it was impossible. Few people are better than they profess to be, but he was one of those few. And if he had had the happiness of twenty lives to lose, he would have lost it all twice over rather than have kept it at any cost of peace or honour to the woman he loved. He allowed himself the right to love her still, which, as he justly remarked, couldn't hurt anybody.
He thought of her as he rode about his lonely plains, looking after black boys and cattle, and dreamt of her as he lay out in the starlight nights, with a saddle for his pillow, and the red light of the camp-fire flickering through the darkness upon his face; and always with a sense that, spiritually and morally, she belonged, before all the world to him.
But he never at heart regretted either that he had seen her that day at the Town-hall, or that he had elected to see her no more. He had done the only thing that it had been in him to do.
