“I never doubted you for a moment,” murmured Imogen, “but it must be confessed, it was hard work holding to my trust in you, when so many rumours were flying through the country. I never could make out why you joined such people at all, or what you were to gain by it. If you wished to know what a miner’s life was like, there are plenty of gentlemen glad enough to go into any venture of the sort, with the aid of a little capital—men such as you have described at the ‘Comstock’ or at Zeehan.”
“But how was I to find them?”
“Just the same way in which you would have done in England, through introductions to men of mark out here. They would have advised you for your good. And there would have been no risk of your being compromised by any action of theirs.”
“No doubt it was indiscreet of me, but I wanted to see for myself, and form my own opinion by personal experience of a society so different from any I had known before.”
“That is where you conceited Englishmen”—here she held up a warning finger—“make a mistake, indeed tons of mistakes. In vain we tell you that there is no special difference here between the classes of society, or the laws which rule them, and those of your own beloved country, which we are proud to resemble.”
“But are they not different?”
“Not radically, by any means. Any departure from English manners and customs is chiefly superficial. Your squire, or lord of the manor, says ‘Mornin’, Jones! crops doin’ so-so, too dry for the roots,’ and so on. ‘Nice four year old of yours. Looks as if he’d grow into a hunter.’ But there’s no real equality, nor can there be. Jones doesn’t expect it.”
“Mr. Bruce, I suppose, has much the same feeling for the farmers here, and they meet on much the same terms. Except when the suspicion of ‘duffing’ comes in, eh? then—then—relations are strained, indeed, as between the same classes, if poaching was discovered, and brought home to the guilty ones.”
They had these, with many other, talks and disquisitions, such as are interesting to lovers, and lovers only, in the long delicious evenings and unquestioned idlesse which are the prerogatives of the halcyon days which follow a declared engagement, and before the completed drama of marriage.