do
a fair thing, neither too much one way or the other. George stayed
and had lunch at the camp with the Commissioner when the court
was adjourned, and he drove away afterwards with his upstanding
eighty-guinea horse--horses was horses in those days--just as good
a gentleman to look at as anybody. Of course we knew there was a
difference, and he'd never get over a few things he'd missed when he was
young, in the way of education. But he was liked and respected for all
that, and made welcome everywhere. He was a man as didn't push himself
one bit. There didn't seem anything but his money and his good-natured
honest face, and now and then a bit of a clumsy joke, to make him a
place. But when the swells make up their minds to take a man in among
themselves they're not half as particular as commoner people; they do a
thing well when they're about it.

So George was hail-fellow-well-met with all the swells at the camp,
and the bankers and big storekeepers, and the doctors and lawyers and
clergymen, all the nobs there were at the Turon; and when the Governor
himself and his lady came up on a visit to see what the place was like,
why George was taken up and introduced as if he'd been a regular blessed
curiosity in the way of contractors, and his Excellency hadn't set eyes
on one before.

'My word! Dick,' Jim says, 'it's a murder he and Aileen didn't cotton
to one another in the old days. She'd have been just the girl to have
fancied all this sort of swell racket, with a silk gown and dressed up a
bit. There isn't a woman here that's a patch on her for looks, is there
now, except Jeanie, and she's different in her ways.'

I didn't believe there was. I began to think it over in my own mind, and
wonder how it came about that she'd missed all her chances of rising
in life, and if ever a woman was born for it she was. I couldn't help
seeing whose fault it was that she'd been kept back and was now obliged
to work hard, and almost ashamed to show herself at Bargo and the other
small towns; not that the people were ever shy of speaking to her, but
she thought they might be, and wouldn't give them a chance. In about a
month up comes Jeanie Morrison from Melbourne, looking just the same as
the very first evening we met Kate and her on the St. Kilda beach. Just
as quiet and shy and modest-looking--only a bit sadder, and not quite so
ready to smile as she'd been in the old days. She looked as if she'd had
a grief to hide and fight down