It was a negative relief when Number One set of Wharfdale Society finally decided that George Chard should be “cut” altogether.
Number Two Set would have accepted him with open arms, but as Number Two Set was only a shade less objectionable and vulgar than Number One Set, George elected to spend his Saturday afternoons fishing.
So he chummed with the Postmaster, who was unmarried, and reported to be an Athiest, or something equally awful, and they grew wise together on the matter of dragon flies and crickets and cockroaches, and other occult bait.
In the intellectual desert of Wharfdale, Dan Creyton, the Postmaster, was to George Chard the only oasis—Dan Creyton and his sister Nora.
Dan Creyton represented three generations of native-born Australians.
His grandfather had grown corn on the Hawkesbury in the old convict days; his father had been a farmer on the Hunter, and had left Dan and his sister a little property equally divided.
With a hundred and fifty pounds a year each in rent and interest, and another hundred and twenty-five from the Government, Nora found no difficulty in keeping house for her brother, and saving money. The Creytons came of good stock, and because of the Breed, which can be transplanted to any climate without degeneration, and which carries its mark on the mouth and the hands, Dan was a gentleman and Nora a lady. And there will be ladies and gentlemen—of Nature and the Breed—just as there will be cads and she-snobs to the end of all time.
Dan Creyton was a reader. Poor George had found little time for the ennobling education of literature, but he recognised the superior intellect, and regarded Dan as his elder friend.
Creyton had watched the play of life in its local relation to George with an amused interest, and when the Meanness-of-Small-Things was sitting on the stool beside the young man one day at the bank, and George was regarding it out of hollow, hopeless eyes, Dan Creyton dropped in and shook hands with him without saying anything.
Thereafter George Chard was Dan Creyton’s friend for weal or for woe.
After all, life and death are small matters.
It is the other things which count—love and hate, and the sunlight down the water.
Nora Creyton, with the warm sympathetic blood of the Celt in her veins; Nora Creyton, with the high, white forehead and the red lips and lustrous eyes, soon became the sunlight of George Chard’s life.