'Oh, well, mate,' he said haltingly, and then stopped altogether. He was drawing an intricate pattern in the dust with the blade of his pen-knife, a favourite pastime with bushmen. The pause was pregnant. At last he looked up with a toss of his head. 'Oh, come on, mate,' he said impatiently. 'Swim across to-night, an' we'll beat up Queensland way. I tell ye, travellin' 's fine. Ye've got no boss to say do this an' that. You goes y'r own way at y'r own gait. Ye'd better come.' 'So you'll go, Ted. I knew you would,' I said, musing in my rather old-fashioned way. It seems a smallish matter enough now; but I know that at the time I was conscious of making a momentous sacrifice, of taking a step of epoch-making significance. Somehow, the very greatness of the sacrifice made me the more determined about it. I should lose my only friend, a devastating loss; and the more clearly I realised how naked this loss would leave me, the more convinced I felt that my decision was right. There is, of course, a kind of gluttony in self-denial; one's appetite for sacrifice, and particularly in youth, may be undeniably avid. 'Well, I did try to stop,' he muttered, almost sullenly for him. And then, with that toss of his head, and the glimmering of a frank smile: 'But I can't stick it. Humpin' a swag's about all I'm fit for, I reckon. You're right, too, it's no game for your father's son.' And here his kindly face lost all trace of anything but friendliness. 'Only, what beats me is what in the world else can ye do, mewed up in this--this blessed work'us. That's what has me beat.' The crisis was passed, and with it the last of Ted's shamefaced constraint. It was admitted between us that he must be off again to his wandering, and that I must stay behind. And now Ted had no thought for anything but my welfare. There was no more awkwardness between us, but only the warmth of this good fellow's real affection, and the almost agreeable melancholy and self-righteous consciousness of wise denial which possessed me. Ted fumbled under his coat with a packet of some food he had brought me: 'Spare me days, the cats might give a lad a bit o' bread to his breakfast--drat 'em!'--and, finally pressed it into my hands, with injunctions to be careful in opening it, as he had put a scrap of writing in with it, for me to remember him by. And so we parted, with no shadow on our friendship, on the track down to the punt.