It wasn’t so very late after all when we got back to Jonathan’s; so, as the horses wanted a bit of a rest and a feed, we roused up the girls and had supper. A very jolly one it was, my word.

They were full of curiosity, you bet, to know how we got on when they heard Moran was there and the others. So bit by bit they picked it out of us. When they heard it all, Maddie got up and threw her arms round Jim’s neck.

“I may kiss you now you’re married,” she says,“and I know there’s only one woman in the world for you; but you deserve one from every woman in the country for smashing that wretch Moran. It’s a pity you didn’t break his neck. Never mind, old man; Miss Falkland won’t forget you for that, you take my word. I’m proud of you, that I am.”

Jim just sat there and let her talk to him. He smiled in a serious kind of way when she ran over to him first; but, instead of a good-looking girl, it might have been his grandmother for all he seemed to care.

“You’re a regular old image, Jim,” says she. “I hope none of my other friends’ll get married if it knocks all the go out of them, same as it has from you. However, you can stand up for a friend, can’t you? You wouldn’t see me trod upon; d’ye think you would, now? I’d stand up for you, I know, if you was bested anywhere.”

“My dear Maddie,” says Starlight, “James is in that particular stage of infatuation when a man only sees one woman in the whole world. I envy him, I assure you. When your day comes you will understand much of what puzzles you at present.”

“I suppose so,” said Maddie, going back to her seat with a won dering, queer kind of look. “But it must be dreadful dull being shut in for weeks and weeks in one place, perhaps, and with only one man.”

“I have heard it asserted,” he says, “that a slight flavour of monotony occasionally assails the honeymoon. Variety is the salt of life, I begin to think. Some of these fine days, Maddie, we’ll both get married and compare notes.”

“You’ll have to look out, then,” says Bella. “All the girls about here are getting snapped up quick. There’s such a lot of young bankers, Government officers, and swells of all sorts about the diggings now, not to reckon the golden-hole men, that we girls have double the pull we had before the gold. Why, there was my old school-mate, Clara Mason, was married last week to such a fine young chap, a surveyor. She’d only known him six weeks.”