real and the present.

"Couldn't you postpone the marriage?" I asked.

"No!" he exclaimed, starting to his feet. "No!" and he looked round
wildly on the darkening bush. There was madness in his tone that time,
the last "No!" sounding as if from a man who was begging for his life.

"Couldn't you run up a shanty then, to live in until the house is
ready?" I suggested, to soothe him.

He gave his arm an impatient swing. "Do you think I'd ask that girl to
live in a hut?" he said. "She ought to live in a palace!"

There seemed no way out of it, so I said nothing: he turned his back
and stood looking away over the dark, low-lying sweep of bush towards
sunset. He folded his arms tight, and seemed to me to be holding
himself. After a while he let fall his arms and turned and blinked at me
and the fire like a man just woke from a doze or rousing himself out of
a deep reverie.

"Oh, I almost forgot the billy!" he said. "I'll make some tea--you must
be hungry."

He made the tea and fried a couple of slices of ham; he laid the biggest
slice on a thick slice of white baker's bread on a tin plate, and put
it and a pint-pot full of tea on a box by my side. "Have it here, by the
fire," he said; "it's warmer and more comfortable."

I took the plate on my knee, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed that
meal. The bracing mountain air and the walk had made me hungry. The
hatter had his meal standing up, cutting his ham on a slice of bread
with a clasp-knife. It was bush fashion, and set me thinking of some
old times. He ate very little, and, as far as I saw, he didn't smoke.
Non-smokers are very scarce in the bush.

I saw by the way his tent was pitched and his camp arranged generally,
and by the way he managed the cooking, that he must have knocked about
the bush for some years.

He put the plates and things away and came and sat down on the other
empty gin-case by my side, and fell to poking the fire again. He never
showed the least curiosity as to who I was, or where I came from, or
what I was doing on this deserted track: he seemed to take me as a
matter of course--but all this was in keeping with bush life in general.

Presently he got up and stood looking upwards over the place where the
house should have been.

"I think now," he said slowly, "I made a mistake in not having the
verandas carried all round the house."

"I--I beg pardon!"

"I should have had the balcony all round instead of on two sides only,
as the man