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Bob did not quite understand–so she explained:

“You are twenty-one, and still receiving food and lodging from your parents as a dole. At your age, if a man receives anything at all from father or mother, he should be earning it as a right.”

She spoke impatiently, and longed to add that he was also impoverishing his intellect. She felt a touch of contempt for him; but a touch of contempt may go with love, and, indeed, competent observers have held that this mixture makes the very finest cement. Certain it is that when Bob answered pathetically, “But I don’t want to leave this roof, I–I can’t, Miss Ormiston, you know!” she missed her opportunity of pointing out that this confession stultified every one of his previous utterances. She began a sentence, indeed, but broke off, with her grey eyes fixed on the ground; and when at length she lifted them, Bob felt something take him by the throat. The few words he proceeded to blurt out stunned him much as if a grenade had exploded close at hand. But when Miss Ormiston burst into tears and declared she must go upstairs at once and pack her box, he recovered, and, looking about, found the aspect of the world bewilderingly changed. There were valleys where hills had stood a moment before.

“I’ll go at once and tell my father,” he said, drawing a full breath and looking like the man he was for the moment.

“And,” sobbed Miss Ormiston, “I’ll go at once and pack my box.”

Herein she showed foresight, for as soon as Bob’s interview with his father was over, she was commanded to leave the premises in time to catch the early train next morning.

Then the Haydon family sat down and talked to Bob.

They began by pooh-poohing the affair. Then, inconsequently, they talked of disgrace, and of scratching his name out of the Family Bible, and said they would rather follow him to his grave than see him married to Miss Ormiston. Lastly, Mrs. Haydon asked Bob who had nursed him, and taught him to walk, and read and know virtue when he saw it. Bob, in the words of the poet, replied, “My mother.” “Very well then,” said Mrs. Haydon.

After forty-eight hours of this Bob wrote to Miss Ormiston, saying, “My father’s indignation is natural, and can only be conquered by time. But I love you always.”

Miss Ormiston replied, “Your father’s indignation is natural, perhaps. But if you love me, it might be conquered by something else,” or words to that effect. At any rate, her letter implied that as it was Bob, and not his father, who proposed to make her a wife, it was on Bob, and not on his father, that she laid the responsibility of fulfilling the promise.

But Bob was weak as water. Love had given him one brief glimpse of the real world: then his father and mother began to talk, and the covers of the Family Bible closed like gates upon his prospect. At the end of a week he wrote–“Nothing shall shake me, dear Ethel. Still, some consideration is due to them; for I am their only son.”

To this Ethel Ormiston sent no answer; but reflected “And what consideration is due to me? for you are my only lover.”

For a while Bob thought of enlisting, and then of earning an honest wage as a farm-labourer; but rejected both notions, because his training had not taught him that independence is better than respectability–yea, than much broadcloth. It was not that he hankered after the fleshpots, but that he had no conception of a world without fleshpots. In the end his father came to him and said–

“Will you give up this girl?”

And Bob answered–

“I’m sorry, father, but I can’t.”

“Very well. Rather than see this shame brought on the family, I will send you out to Australia. I have written to my friend Morris, at Ballawag, New South Wales, three hundred miles from Sydney, and he is ready to take you into his office. You have broken my heart and your mother’s, and you must go.”