When the household retired I continued to sit by my window looking at the twinkling lights of the city, lovely, alluring: they should have held something much nobler than I had met.

Why had Mr. Haddington stirred me so? I couldn’t be in love at first sight with a man old enough to be my father—that would be disgusting; but why should he be able to give a different meaning to life?

As many as a dozen old men have tried to probe if there was a real Harold Beecham to correspond to the hero in my book, and when I assure them that Harold Beecham was made out of imagination they still cling to their own notion. Many young men have told me that they are Harold Beecham or intend to be: girls ask is it true that Harold Beecham was drawn from their suitors because the suitors are claiming so to give themselves added weight and attraction. HAROLD BEECHAM! Pooh, he was the best I had been equipped to imagine at the time. Mr. Haddington had given me an idea of something much better furnished. Now I could see what Mr. Wilting and others meant when they said I had been too inexperienced to attempt a love scene. Mr. Hardy at one end of the scale and Mr. Haddington at the other had been a revelation.

I fell all night from spoke to spoke of a mental wheel:

His son is as old as you are.

His wife is a mighty fine woman.

I am the merest of women and the most special cannot marry where they list.

The one man of our dreams would be sure to rush into marriage early.

Nothing matters.

So what does it matter after all?

Pa always says it will be all the same in a hundred years.

A hundred days, a hundred months are a long dull stretch when taken piecemeal.

His wife is a remarkably fine woman.

This at any rate was something to be thankful for. If a man with the power to so impress me had been such a driveller as to yoke with a nincompoop or a “tart”, I should have felt disgraced.

The following night I fell from spoke to spoke of a different wheel—that of the gallant steam engine which tugged the mails and passengers from Sydney to Melbourne.

Despite an arid interior my last day in Sydney was a heavenly specimen of weather—blue and gold—the Harbor lovelier than a dream. Every garden in the roomy suburbs sprawling on the city’s ridges gave forth a wealth of roses and semitropic bloom. The thoroughfares were decorated with comely young people in white and gay colours. The city piles were outlined against the effulgent sunset ocean of liquid gold as I returned to Geebung Villa for the last time. The misty bays were a fairyland of twinkling lights as we crossed in the ferry and took a cab to Redfern.

Mrs. Crasterton was horrified that I should be travelling second class, but as in the matter of dresses she did not let it run to her pocket. “All those dreadful, coarse men,” she whispered, “Are you sure you will be safe with them? They look like working men.”