"Ah, yes; you men always take sides with us women—when you can."
"Yes, dear, when we can; and you women with us men. I suppose it is the natural order of things. But, anyhow, Wilson isn't much to be pitied. Brooks, the Sydney man, knows him; says he is one of the most thriving men in the colony, and, what is as much to the purpose, has one of the best of women for a wife, and one of the prettiest girls for a daughter that he has ever known. They do business together, Brooks says, he and Wilson, principally in wool; and the Wilsons sometimes come to Sydney, and sometimes he goes up the country to Sedley Station, as Wilson's place is called. So it seems to have all turned out for the best—for him, at any rate."
And so the talk went on, till presently the sunset hues died away, and the oars were resumed; and they little thought how another sunset was at this time drawing on, thousands of miles away, to close in the happy day of the prosperous man of whom they had lightly spoken. But before we come to this, we must go back a few years in our narrative.
In the same month and in the same year in which Tom Grigson settled down in his nest on the banks of the Thames, an event of equal importance to other parties took place at Sedley Station, in New South Wales.
When Walter Wilson left England, after that last despairing sight of his lost love previously mentioned, he made up his mind that the pole-star of his life had disappeared—that his sun had set, never more to rise—that the romance of existence was, to him, past and gone. A good many such foolish and incongruous images rising in his mind, found words in a letter he wrote to Ralph Burgess while on his outward-bound voyage, whereat Ralph good-naturedly smiled. The upshot and conclusion in Walter's thoughts were that he couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't, oughtn't ever to think of matrimony. He would go into the wilds of Australia, he would bury himself alive, he would shun the sight of womankind, he would be a woman-hater all the remainder of his days. This also he wrote to his friend Ralph in bitter self-reproach for having suffered himself to be "choused out" of his life's happiness.
"Poor Wilson! Poor Walter!" sighed Ralph's sister when she read these ravings.
"You needn't pity him so very much, Mary," said the more far-seeing brother; "he isn't heart-broken, depend on it; and if he has had a crack in that region, it will be soldered up in time, and he will be all the wiser for it. If he had married his cousin, I should not have liked (if I had been a woman) to stand in her shoes. When he does marry, as he will—and we shall hear about it some of these days—his wife will stand a good chance of being a happy woman—if she likes."
Ralph's prognostications were fulfilled; they did hear of Walter's marrying. He did not say much about the matter in the letter he wrote announcing the event, excepting that his young wife's name was Helen, which he thought was a pretty name, and he hoped his friend would be pleased with it. The truth perhaps is, that Walter was half-ashamed of his weakness, as he might have thought it, in having permitted his fortress to be again assailed, and successfully too. Having hummed and strummed so long on the wonderful couplet—
"There's such a charm in melancholy,
I would not, if I could."
He was determined not to confess how gay-hearted he really had become.