"I don't know whether he found out that she wasn't all
that she pretented to be to him, or whether they quarrelled,
or whether she chucked him over for a lucky digger. Tom never had any luck
on the goldfields. Anyway, he left and went over to the Victorian side,
where his people were, and went up Gippsland way. It was there
for the first time in his life that he got what you would call
`properly gone on a girl'; he got hard hit -- he met his fate.

"Her name was Bertha Bredt, I remember. Aunt Bob saw her afterwards.
Aunt Bob used to say that she was `a girl as God made her' -- a good,
true, womanly girl -- one of those sort of girls that only love once.
Tom got on with her father, who was packing horses through the ranges
to the new goldfields -- it was rough country and there were no roads;
they had to pack everything there in those days, and there was money in it.
The girl's father took to Tom -- as almost everybody else did --
and, as far as the girl was concerned, I think it was
a case of love at first sight. They only knew each other
for about six months, and were only `courting' (as they called it then)
for three or four months altogether, but she was that sort of girl
that can love a man for six weeks and lose him for ever,
and yet go on loving him to the end of her life -- and die with his name
on her lips.

"Well, things were brightening up every way for Tom, and he and his sweetheart
were beginning to talk about their own little home in future,
when there came a letter from the `Madeline' girl in New South Wales.

"She was in terrible trouble. Her baby was to be born in a month.
Her people had kicked her out, and she was in danger of starving.
She begged and prayed of him to come back and marry her,