She asked me to let her be my friend, and she asked me to go on teaching her and helping her to be worthy of Nick.
It’s only good women that can rub it into a chap, by saying things like that.
Help to improve her for the joy of another man—a man probably, I thought then, not worthy to tie her shoe-strings! But I said I’d do my best to be her friend, and I’d love her always. And I think I had a lurking hope that the other fellow might throw her over at the last, or that she might find she had been making a mistake.
Of course I didn’t believe all that, about the unjust sentence. I asked her where he was, and then it seemed like a fate, that she should say Eungella, and I told her that it was Eungella I was bound to.
She knew he was to meet her in Sydney. I knew it, too. And I shall never forget the wonderful look on Nan’s face, as we steamed in between Sydney Heads into the new world.
She was trembling all through her little thin body, and her red lips were parted, and her eyes were like two shining stars set in darkness. “Oh, how beautiful it is!” I heard her murmur; “and Nick is there.”
It was beautiful: the great rugged cliffs and the sun setting over the barren ridge of rock, and then the harbour with all its little bays lying blue and peaceful, and the town and the forts, and the lovely Botanic Gardens with their tropical trees and the feathery clumps of bamboos.
Nan had never seen such trees and plants before. But I don’t think she distinguished anything; I am sure it was all like a picture in a dream to her. She could think of nothing, but that she was going to see Nick.
I felt her give a little gasp and a strange cry, as he came pressing forward from the crowd on the wharf. He never seemed to pause or hesitate. He knew her at once for his own.
He was a great, tall fellow, with a sunburnt face, and he had a noble presence—I was obliged to own that. And he had clear, blue eyes and fair, curly hair. He made me think, somehow, of one of the old Vikings of the North. I didn’t wonder that she loved him.