t look," laughed Nellie. "I make my own dresses and trim
my own hats. A woman wouldn't think much of the stuff either."

"I want to tell you how obliged I was for that money, Ned," continued
Nellie, an expression of pain on her face. "There was no one else I could
ask, and I needed it so. It was very kind--"

"Ugh! That's nothing," interrupted Ned, hiding his bashfulness under a
burst of boisterousness. "Why, Nellie, I'd like you to be sending to me
regular. It might just as well come to you as go any other way. If you
ever do want a few pounds again, Nellie,"--he added, seriously, "I can
generally manage it. I've got plenty just now--far more than I'll ever
need." This with wild exaggeration. "You might as well have it as not.
I've got nobody."

"Thanks, just the same, Ned! When I do want it I'll ask you. I'm afraid
I'll never have any money to lend you if you need it, but if I ever do
you know where to come."

"It's a bargain, Nellie," said Ned. Then, eager to change the subject,
feeling awkward at discussing money matters because he would have been so
willing to have given his last penny to anybody he felt friends with,
much less to the girl by his side:

"But where are we going?"

"To see Sydney!" said Nellie.

They had turned several times since they started but the neighborhood
remained much the same. The streets, some wider, some narrower, all told
of sordid struggling. The shops were greasy, fusty, grimy. The groceries
exposed in their windows damaged specimens of bankrupt stocks, discolored
tinned goods, grey sugars, mouldy dried fruits; at their doors, flitches
of fat bacon, cut and dusty. The meat with which the butchers' shops
overflowed was not from show-beasts, as Ned could see, but the cheaper
flesh of over-travelled cattle, ancient oxen, ewes too aged for bearing;
all these lean scraggy flabby-fleshed carcasses surrounded and blackened
by buzzing swarms of flies that invaded the foot-path outside in clouds.
The draperies had tickets, proclaiming unparalleled bargains, on every
piece; the whole stock seemed displayed outside and in the doorway. The
fruiterers seemed not to be succeeding in their rivalry with each other
and with the Chinese hawkers. The Chinese shops were dotted everywhere,
dingier than any other, surviving and succeeding, evidently, by sheer
force of cheapness. The roadways everywhere were hard and bare,
reflecting the rays of the ascending sun until the streets seemed to be
Turki