"How brave you were!" she said.

"Brave!" he cried, with a joyous peal of laughter; "wasn't I working for
my darling? Through all the dreary time of that probation, her pretty
white hand seemed beckoning me onward to a happy future! Why, I have
seen her under my wretched canvas tent sitting by my side, with her boy
in her arms, as plainly as I had ever seen her in the one happy year of
our wedded life. At last, one dreary foggy morning, just three months
ago, with a drizzling rain wetting me to the skin, up to my neck in clay
and mire, half-starved, enfeebled by fever, stiff with rheumatism, a
monster nugget turned up under my spade, and I was in one minute the
richest man in Australia. I fell down on the wet clay, with my lump of
gold in the bosom of my shirt, and, for the first time in my life, cried
like a child. I traveled post-haste to Sydney, realized my price, which
was worth upward of L20,000, and a fortnight afterward took my passage
for England in this vessel; and in ten days--in ten days I shall see my
darling."

"But in all that time did you never write to your wife?"

"Never, till the night before I left Sydney. I could not write when
everything looked so black. I could not write and tell her that I was
fighting hard with despair and death. I waited for better fortune, and
when that came I wrote telling her that I should be in England almost as
soon as my letter, and giving her an address at a coffee-house in London
where she could write to me, telling me where to find her, though she is
hardly likely to have left her father's house."

He fell into a reverie after this, and puffed meditatively at his cigar.