hard-working fellows, content with
enough of eating, working, and sleeping, and neither needing nor heeding
aught else. The only one at the Flat with whom he had any close sympathy
was Mrs. Taylor, and even with her he felt a restraint occasionally
which perplexed him, for she gave him of her matronly love to a greater
degree than she gave to the others. She had never lost the influence of
her old-country up-bringing, and to Tony, her own and yet not her own,
she was bound by more than the ties of maternity.

His return at the present juncture was fraught with keen interest to
her, for she, in her remnant of old-world romance, had watched with
kindly sympathy the growing companionship of Tony and Ailleen from the
time when they were school-children together; and in between the busy
but withal prosaic hours of her life, she had stolen enough time to
weave daydreams round the union, some day, of her handsome, dark-eyed,
daring boy, and the fair-haired Saxon Ailleen. She had watched the
companionship ripen into something more--into something which the two
did not even realize themselves, but which was only too evident to her
jealously sharpened eyes; for she was jealous of the boy, although far
from spitefully.

Most of his daring escapades had been performed under the influence,
unrecognized by him, of Ailleen's passing disregard, and the elder woman
had often inveighed in her mind against the waywardness of the younger,
who, having such a treasure within her grasp, ignored it, and ran the
risk, however slight, of losing it. Unfortunately, both Tony and Ailleen
possessed the free-born Australian spirit to a degree which made it more
than difficult to guide or counsel them--only could one stand idly by
and, apparently without noticing anything, chafe and worry lest the
break away should come.

And the break away had come. The starting away with the gold-diggers was
an unmistakable token of Tony's revolt; the moving out to Barellan
immediately after her father's death was the unquestionable reply of
Ailleen. But it did not necessarily follow that the result was foregone,
and Mrs. Taylor, in her efforts to grasp the movements of the modern
development of youth, had argued with herself that perhaps, after all,
this double split might only be the later form of the old-fashioned
lover's quarrel. The return of Tony, on the first occasion, was an
evidence that she was right, and she watched him as he hastened away to
Barellan.