"Never mind that," interrupted the girl. "If a man's a man his word's his word, and if he's not all the swearing in the world won't make any difference. Let's shake on it!" She held out her hand.
Mr. Hobbs dropped the door-knob and covered her long, slender hand with his great, broad, horny-palmed one.
"Good night, Mr. Hobbs!" she said, the "shake" being over. "Get her to sleep and don't let her fret!"
"Good night, Miss Nellie!" he answered, using her name for the first time. He wanted to say something more but his voice got choked up and he shut the door in her face, so confused was he.
"Hello, Nellie!" said a voice that made her heart stand still, as she crossed the road, walking sadly homewards. At the same time two hands stretched out of the dense shadow into the lane of moonlight that shone down an alley way she was passing and that cut a dazzling swath in the blackness made still blacker by the surrounding brilliancy. "I've been wondering if you ever would finish that pitch of yours."
It was Ned.
CHAPTER II.
ON THE ROAD TO QUEENSLAND.
While Nellie had been talking temperance to Mr. Hobbs, Ned had been watching her impatiently from the other side of the street. For an hour and more he had been prowling up and down, up and down, between the Phillipses and the Hobbses, having learned from Mrs. Phillips, who looked wearier than ever, where the Hobbses lived now and why Nellie had gone there after hardly stopping to swallow her dinner. At seven he had acquired this information and returned soon after nine to find Nellie still at the house of sickness, now, alas, the house of death. So he had paced up and down, up and down, waiting for her. He had seen the Hobbs' door open at last and had watched impatiently, from the shadow opposite, the conversation on the door step. His heart gave a great leap as she stopped across the road full in the moonlight. He saw again the sad stern face that had lived as an ideal in his memory for two long eventful years. There was none like her in the whole world to him, not one.
The years had come to her in this stifling city, amid her struggling and wrestling of spirit, but the strong soul in her had borne her up through all, she had aged without wearying, grown older and sadder without withering from her intense womanhood. Broader of hip a little, as Ned could see with the keen eyes of love, not quite so slender in the waist, fuller in the uncorsetted bust, more sloping of shoulder as though the pillared neck had fleshed somewhat at the base; the face, too, had gathered form and force, in the freer curve of her will-full jaw, in the sterner compression of fuller lips that told their tale of latent passions strangely bordering on the cruel, in the sweeter blending of Celt and Saxon shown in straight nose, strong cheek-bones and well-marked brows. She trod still with the swinging spring of the bill-people, erect and careless. Only the white gleam of her collar and a dash of colour in her hat broke the sombre hue that clothed her, as before, from head to foot.