ite alone in the world. I have no
relatives that I care for, except one brother. I lived with him, on his
station in Queensland, until I came here. But now he's married, and
there would be no room for me in the house--figuratively speaking. If I
go back now, I must share his home with his wife, whom I knew and
disliked. While here is some one who is fond of me, and is rich, and
who offers me not only a home of my own, but, what is far more to me,
an entirely new life in a new world."

"Excellent reasons! But in reckoning them up, you have forgotten what
seems to me the most important one of all; whether or no you care for
him, for this ..." this in his trouble, he could not find a suitable
epithet.

But Louise refused to be touched. "I like him," she answered, and
looked across the slope of meadow they were passing. "I liked him, yes,
as any woman would like a man who treated her as he did me. He was very
good tome. And not in the least repugnant.--But care?" she interrupted
herself. "If by care, you mean ... Then no, a hundred thousand times,
no! I shall never care for anyone in that way again, and you know it. I
had enough of that to last me all my life."

"Very well, then, and I say, if you married a man you care for as
little as that, I should never believe in a woman again.--Not, of
course, that it matters to you what I believe in and what I don't? But
to hear you--you, Louise!--counting up the profits to be gained from
it, like ... like--oh, I don't know what! I couldn't have believed it
of you."

"You are a very uncomfortable person, Maurice."

"I mean to be. And more than uncomfortable. Listen to me! You talk of
it lightly and coolly; but if you married this man, without caring for
him more than you say you do, just for the sake of a home, or his
money, or his good manners, or the primitive animal, or whatever it is
that attracts you in him:"--he grew bitter again in spite of
himself--"if you did this, you would be stifling all that is good and
generous in your nature. For you may say what you like; the man is
little more than a stranger to you. What can you know of his real
character? And what can he know of you?"

"He knows as much of me as I ever intend him to know."

"Indeed! Then you wouldn't tell him, for instance, that only a few
months ago, you were eating your heart out for some one else?"

Louise winced as though the words had struck her in the face. Before
she answered, she stood still, in t