Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/149

 thorough, respectable old freethinker, and consequently they often get a War Cry or a tract sent inside their exchanges―somebody puts it in for a joke.

Long years agone―long years agone Bill and Jim were 'sweet' on a rose of the bush―or a lily of the goldfields―call her Lily King. Bill and Jim both courted her at the same time, and quarrelled over―her fought over her, perhaps and were parted by her for years. But that's all bygones. Perhaps she loved Bill, perhaps she loved Jim―perhaps both; or, maybe, she wasn't sure which. Perhaps she loved neither, and was only 'stringing them on.' Anyway, she didn't marry either the one or the other. She married another man―call him Jim Smith. And so, in after years, Bill comes across a paragraph in a local paper, something like the following:―

And Bill marks it with a loud chuckle and big crosses, and sends it along to Jim. Then Bill sits and thinks and smokes, and thinks till the fire goes out, and quite forgets all about putting that necessary patch on his pants.

And away down on Auckland gumfields, perhaps, Jim reads the par with a grin; then grows serious, and sits and scrapes his gum by the flickering firelight in a mechanical manner, and―thinks. His thoughts are far away in the back years―faint and far, far and faint. For the old, lingering, banished pain returns, and hurts a man's heart like the false wife who comes back again, falls on her knees before him, and holds