We all rode on, but none of us seemed to care to say much. Every step we went seemed to be taking us away from the place where we’d all been so happy together. The next change was sure to be for the worse. What it would be, or when it would come, we none of us could tell.

Starlight and Aileen rode together most of the way, and talked a good deal, we could see. Before we got to the stock-yard she rode over to Jim and cheered him up as much as she could about Jeanie. She said she’d write to her, and tell her all about him, and how happy we’d all been together lately; and tell her that Jim would find some way to get down to her this spring, if he could manage it any road.

“If I’m above ground, tell her I’ll be with her,” says poor old Jim, “before Christmas. If she don’t see me then I’ll be dead, and she may put on black and make sure she’s a widow.”

“Oh, come, you mustn’t talk like that, Jim, and look to the bright side a bit. There’s a good chance yet, now the country’s so full of diggers and foreigners. You try your luck, and you’ll see your wife yet.”

Then she came to me, and talked away just like old times. “You’re the eldest, Dick,” she said, “and so it’s proper for me to say what I’m going to say.” Then she told me all that was in her heart about Starlight. He and she had made it up that if he could get away to a foreign country she would join him there, and take mother with her. There was to be no marrying or love-making unless they could carry out that plan. Then she told me that she had always had the same sort of feeling towards him. “When I saw him first I thought I had never seen a man before—never one that I could care for or think of marrying. And now he has told me that he loves me—loves me, a poor ignorant girl that I am; and I will wait for him all my life, and follow him all round the world. I feel as if I could die for him, or wear out my life in trying to make him happy. And yet, and yet,” she said, and all her face grew sad, and put on the old look that I knew so well, so hopeless, so full of quiet bearing of pain,“I have a kind of feeling at my heart that it will never be. Something will happen to me or to him. We are all doomed to sorrow and misfortune, and nothing can save us from our fate.”