THE Christmas holidays were approaching, and the young schoolmaster was to leave Kanga Creek, not for his holidays but for ever. His father had written from England that a passage home had been taken for him in the ship St. Vincent, which would sail from Sydney immediately after Christmas. He was nearly beside himself with excitement. Now, at last, his ambitious dreams were to be realised. He would go home, work hard, win for himself a place in the world.

That was certainly the strongest impulse within him. Yet his life had become more complex of late, and his career no longer seemed to him, as it had seemed six months before, a burden to be lifted with a light heart, and borne as easily as he bore the bucket from the well. Now there was a certain heaviness at his heart, a dull tangle of emotions which he could not unravel, and had no inclination to try to unravel. He was beginning to know the conflict of instincts which as they develop fetter each other’s actions and make our deeds no longer merely instinctive but heroic and unheroic.

He walked up and down by the lagoon waiting. It was here that he had first spoken to her, and now he had come to say good-bye. As he walked rapidly up and down, filled with the new tumult of feverish thoughts, his eyes seemed to fall constantly on a dead tree he had seen often before, a tragic tree flinging out two bare gaunt arms, as though immobilised in the agony of some deadly stroke. In after years that pathetic vision of arrested life always came to mingle half absurdly — perhaps only half absurdly — with the memory of this meeting, with, indeed, the entire memory of this episode in his life.

The lagoon lay with its faintly sloping edges, peaceful and silent as ever, the unnatural peace and silence as of another world. He sat down, with a sense of oppression, o............