will and of an intense womanliness. From the pronounced jaw that melted
its squareness of profile in the oval of the full face to the dark brown
eyes that rarely veiled themselves beneath their long-lashed lids,
everything told that the girl possessed the indefinable something we call
character. And if there was in the drooping corners of her red lips a
sternness generally unassociated with conceptions of feminine loveliness
one forgot it usually in contemplating the soft attractiveness of the
shapely forehead, dashed beneath by straight eyebrows, and of the
pronounced cheekbones that crossed the symmetry of a Saxon face. Mrs.
Phillips was a drooping wearied woman but there was nothing drooping
about Nellie and never could be. She might be torn down like one of the
blue gums under which she had drawn in the fresh air of her girlhood, but
she could no more bend than can the tree which must stand erect in the
fiercest storm or must go down altogether. Pale she was, from the close
air of the close street and close rooms, but proud she was as woman can
be, standing erect in the door-way amid all this pandemonium of cries,
waiting for Ned. Ned was her old playmate, a Darling Downs boy, five
years older to be sure, but her playmate in the old days, nevertheless,
as lads who have no sisters are apt to be with admiring little girls who
have no brothers. Selectors' children, both of them, from neighbouring
farms, born above the frost line under the smelting Queensland sun,
drifted hither and thither by the fitful gusts of Fate as are the
paper-sailed ships that boys launch on flood water pools, meeting here in
Sydney after long years of separation. Now, Nellie was a dressmaker in a
big city shop, and Ned a sun-burnt shearer to whom the great trackless
West was home. She thought of the old home sadly as she stood there
waiting for him.

It had not been a happy home altogether and yet, and yet--it was better
than this. There was pure air there, at least, and grass up to the door,