I opened fire without any beating about the bush.

“I ask you, Mr Hawden, if you have any sense of manliness, from this hour to cease persecuting me with your idiotic professions of love.  I have two sentiments regarding it, and in either you disgust me.  Sometimes I don’t believe there is such a thing as love at all—­that is, love between men and women.  While in this frame of mind I would not listen to professions of love from an angel.  Other times I believe in love, and look upon it as a sacred and solemn thing.  When in that humour, it seems to me a desecration to hear you twaddling about the holy theme, for you are only a boy, and don’t know how to feel.  I would not have spoken thus harshly to you, but by your unmanly conduct you have brought it upon yourself.  I have told you straight all that I will ever deign to tell you on the subject, and take much pleasure in wishing you good afternoon.”

I walked away quickly, heedless of his expostulations.

My appeal to his manliness had no effect.  Did I go for a ride, or a walk in the afternoon to enjoy the glory of the sunset, or a stroll to drink in the pleasures of the old garden, there would I find Frank Hawden by my side, yah, yah, yahing about the way I treated him, until I wished him at the bottom of the Red Sea.

However, in those glorious spring days the sense of life was too pleasant to he much clouded by the trifling annoyance Frank Hawden occasioned me.  The graceful wild clematis festooned the shrubbery along the creeks with great wreaths of magnificent white bloom, which loaded every breeze with perfume; the pretty bright green senna shrubs along the river-banks were decked in blossoms which rivalled the deep blue of the sky in brilliance; the magpies built their nests in the tall gum-trees, and savagely attacked unwary travellers who ventured too near their domain; the horses were rolling fat, and invited one to get on their satin backs and have a gallop; the cry of the leather-heads was heard in the orchard as the cherry season approached.  Oh, it was good to be alive!

At Caddagat I was as much out of the full flood of life for which I craved as at Possum Gully, but here there were sufficient pleasant little ripples on the stream of existence to act as a stop-gap for the present.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He

Here goes for a full account of my first, my last, my only real sweetheart, for I considered the professions of that pestiferous jackeroo as merely a grotesque caricature on the genuine article.