All that day, being awful hot and close, we stayed in the house and yarned away with mother and Aileen till they thought—poor souls—that we had turned over a new leaf and were going to stay at home and be good boys for the future. When a man sees how little it takes to make women happy—them that’s good and never thinks of anything but doing their best for everybody belonging to ‘em it’s wonderful how men ever make up their minds to go wrong and bring all that loves them to shame and grief. When they’ve got nobody but themselves to think of it don’t so much matter as I know of; but to keep on breaking the hearts of those as never did you anything but good, and wouldn’t if they lived for a hundred years, is cowardly and unmanly any way you look at it. And yet we’d done very little else ourselves these years and years.

We all sat up till nigh on to midnight with our hands in one another’s—Jim down at mother’s feet; Aileen and I close beside them on the old seat in the verandah that father made such a time ago. As last mother gets up, and they both started for bed. Aileen seemed as if she couldn’t tear herself away. Twice she came back, then she kissed us both, and the tears came into her eyes. “I feel too happy,” she said; “I never thought I should feel like this again. God bless you both, and keep us all from harm.” “Amen,” said mother from the next room. We turned out early, and had a bathe in the creek before we went up to the yard to let out the horses. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky; it was safe to be a roasting hot day, but it was cool then. The little waterhole where we learned to swim when we were boys was deep on one side and had a rocky ledge to jump off. The birds just began to give out a note or two; the sun was rising clear and bright, and we could see the dark top of Nulla Mountain getting a sort of rose colour against the sky.

“George and Gracey’ll be over soon after breakfast,” I said; “we must have everything look ship-shape as well as we can before they turn up.”

“The horses may as well go down to the flat,” Jim says; “we can catch them easy enough in time to ride back part of the way with them. I’ll run up Lowan, and give her a bit of hay in the calf-pen.”