at the `Royal' -- she used to have plates of pudding and hot pie for me
on the big gridiron arrangement over the kitchen range;
and after the third tuck-out I thought it was good enough
to do a bit of a bear-up in that direction. She mentioned one day, yarning,
that she liked a stroll by the creek sometimes in the cool of the evening.
I thought she'd be off that day, so I said I'd go for a fish
after I'd knocked off. I thought I might get a bite.
Anyway, I didn't catch Lizzie -- tell you about that some other time.

"It was Sunday. I'd been fishing for Lizzie about an hour
when I saw a skirt on the bank out of the tail of my eye --
and thought I'd got a bite, sure. But I was had. It was Miss Wilson
strolling along the bank in the sunset, all by her pretty self.
She was a slight girl, not very tall, with reddish frizzled hair,
grey eyes, and small, pretty features. She spoke as if
she had more brains than the average, and had been better educated.
Jack Drew was the only young man in Redclay she could talk to,
or who could talk to a girl like her; and that was the whole trouble
in a nutshell. The newspaper office was next to the bank, and I'd seen her
hand cups of tea and cocoa over the fence to his office window more than once,
and sometimes they yarned for a while.

"She said, `Good morning, Mr. Mitchell.'

"I said, `Good morning, Miss.'

"There's some girls I can't talk to like I'd talk to other girls.
She asked me if I'd caught any fish, and I said, `No, Miss.'
She asked me if it wasn't me down there fishing with Mr. Drew
the other evening, and I said, `Yes -- it was me.' Then presently