It came to her, with a jealous little twinge, that after all the haste he had shown in riding had been prompted by another girl; and in the midst of her battle with feelings realized and feelings unrealized, the struggle between the important and the unimportant, Ailleen, as a woman, naturally jumped at the unimportant, and clung to it.
"That was very good of her. I'm glad you had her advice. Won't you sit down?"
The words were as foreign as they well could be to what was in her heart, but they relieved the situation for the moment, and saved her from showing what she really meant.
"Why didn't you go to the Flat?" he asked, not heeding her words; "mother would do anything for you, and father too—or to the Murrays, or anywhere but here? Won't you come now? Mother wants you to come to the Flat, and every one in Birralong——"
"I promised before——" and her lip quivered for a moment—"to come to Mrs. Dickson. She asked me. I don't want to—offend any one, but—she is so kind to me, and she's blind too, poor creature, and all alone."
"But, Ailleen——" he began, and stopped, looking hard at her face, turned half away from him in her anxiety to avoid meeting his glance. "We've found gold," he went on presently, after a few moments' silence. "Not much, but still enough to—enough for us. When I've got enough—when I come back—after this trip—if—I——"
He was floundering along, struggling vainly to put just one simple little sentiment into a simple little sentence, and drifting more and more into confusion and away from what he wanted to say. What that was she was quite well aware, and also was aware what reply she would make to it when once it was said; but for the present, with eternal feminine perversity, she did not want it said, so she saw an imagined rider across the paddock, and exclaimed—
"Is that Willy Dickson over there?"
Tony looked, half angrily.
"It isn't anybody," he said.