Front matter (continued 5)

'Well, no doubt I am rather foolish to be so much concerned. You see, Stella, you have so many brothers, you do not know how a woman feels when she has only one. Poor dear Ted is so unhappy just now. He offended you. Well, I undertook to make his peace with you. He did not go into particulars; perhaps he begged for one of the many kisses you owe him. Dear me, what a freezing air! I wonder how many kisses your brother Tom snatched from me; and yet he never proposed to me even once. Certainly I never set up for a monument of icy hauteur. Still, I never forgot that I was Sir Edward Ritchie's daughter, any more than I am likely to forget that I am the wife of the Hon. Talbot Tareling.'

Laurette drew herself up to her full height, and Stella was too much amused to retain an air of offended majesty.

'At the same time,' said Laurette, astutely taking advantage of this to show a sudden change of front, 'I don't think you need be afraid of Ted pestering you again. Now, my dear, let us have a proper talk over this. Sit down here; we may as well be comfortable, and not stand staring at each other like two strange cats on the roof. I believe there were tears in Ted's eyes when he took me into his confidence. "What do you think I'd better do, Larry?" said he. "Do?" said I. "Why, nothing." "But I am afraid she's very angry," said he. "She hasn't even ridden out with me since, and now she's away for the whole day. It feels as long as a month of Sundays. I shouldn't wonder if she sent me back that dashed horseshoe"—indeed, I am afraid he used a stronger word. Poor old Ted! you know he is a little rough sometimes. But how good and generous he is!—though I sometimes call him stingy in fun. There he was yesterday, trying to make me take a cheque for I don't know how much. But, of course, when a woman is married, there is a limit to what she can accept, even from a brother. Besides, I had a sort of feeling that it was more for your sake than my own—a sort of testimonial because I am nice enough for you to visit me.'

Laurette, when it suited her purpose, was a finished mistress of that adroit flattery which seema inseparable from radical insincerity of nature.

'I must say that was very humble of you,' said Stella, laughing outright.

It is foolish to flatter people with a strong sense of humour; even if they like it, they must see through it.

'Well, but to return to this storm in a teacup. I couldn't help laughing about the horseshoe; and I said, "If Stella wants to get rid of that in a huff, why, I'll take charge of it."'

'I wish you would, Laurette. I'll leave it in your hands,' said Stella.

'Oh, certainly,' returned Laurette, with an indulgent smile; and she mentally ticked this off as one point gained. But she had not finished yet. 'Then Ted said to me, "Now, Larry, tell me—do you think I'm any nearer the end of this long courtship, one way or the other? Is it more likely or unlikely that Stella will have me?" "Ted," said I, "don't ask me what Stella will do or will not do. I've long ago felt about this affair as if I were looking at a play—one of the sort that nearly makes you fall in pieces with yawning, don't you know. It's so long, and people come on and off, and you sit through one act after another, thinking that surely something will happen soon; but it doesn't, and there you gape till the curtain is rung down, and you feel like a perfect fool." At that Ted got rather angry, as if I were prophesying evil. Of course, I didn't mean to do that; so I simply said, "When a girl lets a man dangle after her for years——"'

'You had no right to say——' said Stella, colouring hotly.

'Well, please remember this was a confidential chat with my only brother. "When a girl lets a man dangle after her for years, and prevents him from thinking of anyone else, and in the end doesn't know whether she'll have him or leave him—why, then I think it is time for him to take his fortune into his own hands."'

'Well, that, at least, was good advice,' said Stella, 'and I hope Ted will act on it.'

'Will you believe it?' said Laurette, laughing—'he has solemnly made up his mind that unless you write to him about something, or give him some direct encouragement, he will from this time forth try to think of you only as a friend. I believe that is partly why he has gone to Flemington.'

'I am glad that he is reasonable at fast,' answered Stella; but, notwithstanding the words, Laurette felt sure there was some pique in the flush that settled in the girl's cheeks.

CHAPTER XXV.

When Ritchie returned, and found that during his absence Stella had taken her departure for Lullaboolagana, his chagrin was extreme.

'She asked me to say good-bye to you for herself and Dustiefoot, and gave her kind regards to Shah,' said Laurette, as she sat skimming a budget of letters and notes that had just been delivered.

Ted felt like one who has suddenly been dragged out of the sunlight, and has had the key turned on him in a cheerless dungeon.

'She is to finish her visit in September,' said Laurette, when she found that Ted made no response.

He stared at the Age for some time in gloomy silence, glancing from one column to another as if he were reading, but not seeing a line.

'Well, I don't suppose it's to make much difference to me whether she comes here or anywhere else,' he answered.

Laurette made no reply.

'Was that all Stella said?' asked Ritchie after a pause; 'just to say good-bye? Was she at all put out that Louise wanted her at once, or was the thing a plant, do you think—just an excuse to be off?'

'Ted, don't ask so many questions, or I shall betray confidence,' said Laurette.

'Betray confidence? Bosh!' retorted Ritchie in a disdainful tone. 'You can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. At Christmas-time you thought you were going to do great shakes by getting Stella here, and showing her what a dash you cut; and now she's gone off in less than two weeks without even saying good-bye to me. And then there's something that you know in confidence. I should think I am the proper person to be taken into confidence, if there's anything to confide.'

'You asked if Stella only said good-bye,' said Laurette, in an impressive tone. 'Well, we had a long, private talk.'

Ted leant forward, no longer pretending to read the newspaper.

'Yes; and what was the talk about?'

'Before telling you that, I must get your promise that you will not let Stella know I told you.'

'I'm not such a confounded blab as to carry yarns between people.'

'Then tell me, has Stella, since she came here, said anything that led you to think she had been debating in her own mind whether or not she would accept you?'

'Yes; she told me that since I last saw her she had sometimes thought she would come to the scratch.'

'Ah! Well, after all, you understood her better than I do. They say that women have so much penetration; but I think some men have. You asked me one day if I thought Stella had heard anything.'

'Well?'

'She has.'

'Ah, I suppose Cuth, the parson, has fossicked?'

'I don't think so. I believe it is a slight rumour, but enough to disquiet her—to make her uncertain.'

'I shall write and make a clean breast of it; tell her all.'

'Not for your life. At least, not if you don't mean to lose her.'

'Lose her? I haven't got her, and not likely to now!'

'Ah, there you are mistaken. Stella loves you, Ted,' and Laurette, without a quiver of her eyelid, gazed into the young man's face. He flushed deeply, and walked about the room with signs of evident emotion.

'If I could believe that——' he said, and stopped.

'You may believe it,' she said, in a tone of quiet confidence which thrilled him with joy.

'And in spite of—what she has heard?'

'Yes; and when she returns here in September—well, I can only judge by what she said, and by what she did not say, which is often quite as important, and by what I observed—I believe you will get a speedy answer. But, whatever you do, don't write to her till you do see her, for she would instantly think I told you all that passed between us, and I have not done that, and don't mean to.'

'Well, Larry, this is very good news you have given me,' said Ted, and he was so much moved that his voice trembled.

Some visitors were announced, and Ted took himself off, and went for a long spin on Shah, trying to realize that his tedious years of waiting were after all to be crowned with the one great joy that had so long seemed a vision beyond his reach.

The next little scene in Laurette's coup took place three days later, in the evening. Ted was to return to Strathhaye on the following day. A servant brought in some letters on a salver. Among them was one which Laurette had posted to herself, containing a long letter that Tareling had written to her a year or two previously. Latterly he never wrote long letters, even on business. Laurette crushed the envelope into her pocket, and began to read this letter with an air of absorbed attention. Presently she gave a little sharp cry.

'What's the row?' said Ted, looking up. 'A letter from Tareling?' he said, glancing at the sheet, which Laurette re-perused with a most dejected countenance. But she said nothing. She read one or two more notes; one of them a delightfully intimate one from the Hon. Miss Brendover, Lady Weavelow's sister, asking Laurette and Miss Courtland to spend an afternoon at Government House in an informal way two days hence.

'Tell me, Ted,' said Laurette suddenly, 'how much is father really affected by the rabbits?'

'How much? Well, there, you ask a question that neither he nor I can answer at present. Within the last twelve months he has spent £9,000 on sending the bunnies to kingdom-come; and how much he'll spend during the current twelve months, the Lord only knows!'

'But I thought this rabbit extermination was partly at the expense of Government?'

'Exactly; and that's why the vermin have been increasing head over heels. Why, the governor himself has had forty-three rabbits trapped, with the scalp taken off, and let run again that they may go on breeding. You see, these scoundrels in Government pay mean to make a permanent job of it. They get so much for every scalp, so, instead of killing the little brutes, they sometimes carefully take the skin off the top of the head, and in the course of a few months there are thousands more bred by the animals they have been paid for killing. When the governor saw what was going on he jacked up at once—gave the Government notice he would see to doing away with the rabbits on his own account. So there he is paying at the rate of £30 a day, and putting up a rabbit-proof fence between his land and the land in Government possession.'

'But, then, of course, father has been saving a lot of money all these years. It doesn't take more than eight or nine thousand a year to keep Godolphin House going.'

'Yes, he has unfortunately put four or five hundred thousand pounds into good investments in South Australia,' said Ted grimly. 'He had £150,000 in Commercial Bank Shares, which at the present moment may be had wall-high for an old song; he has £100,000 in the Town and Country Bank, which is more shaky than a poplar leaf; he has a pot of money in tram lines that will yet be sold for old iron; and he has heaps of tin in houses that cost him a handsome sum every quarter for broken windows, and advertisements for tenants that don't turn up. Perhaps you thought the governor cut up rather rough when he had to shell-out a thousand pounds over that shady concern of Tareling's six months ago; but, by Jove! if you knew how much money the old man has dropped lately in one way or another——'

'Well, I suppose we'll have to take up our abode permanently at Cannawijera,' said Laurette in a resigned tone.

'Yes. It licks me why you don't make more of a home of that place,' said the unsuspecting Ted—'make a garden—you've only got to irrigate, you know: it's ridiculous to pay a manager on a little station like that—and make the place trim and comfortable. In fact, Stella told me she liked Coonjooree so much the last time she was there, she means to go again before long. Jove, I hope I may be there if she does!'

'Well, you see, I am not one of the gifted souls that love a worm-eaten old poet so much better than my fellow-creatures,' said Laurette a little viciously, and the next moment regretted giving any indication of the loathing that the place excited in her mind; but she had the faculty of saying sharp things, and found it hard to resist the temptation. 'But now that nothing else is left to us,' she said with a pensive resignation—'well, I dare say we shall make the best of it. Perhaps, if you come to see us next month, Ted, you will find Talbot planting a grass-tree against the wash-house wall.'

'You must bet him it won't grow, Larry, or he'll never finish the job,' said Ted, laughing. 'You mean next year, though; not next month?'

By way of answer Laurette unfolded her husband's letter, and read aloud:

'"It is only fair to let you know at as early a date as possible that I have lost every stiver of the money I brought with me, and am probably liable for as much more. This comes of trying to earn money by downright honest work——"'

'Baccarat!' interjected Ted; but Laurette did not heed this.

'"If I had been content, as so many are, to take the words of thieving brokers, instead of coming here to see for myself, we would probably have trebled our little haul from the Celestial Hills. But it's no use crying over spilt milk. And I am determined that neither you nor I will ask a loan or an advance from your father or——"'

Laurette stopped short.

'That close-fisted hunks of a brother of yours, that's about it, isn't it?' said Ted, without a soupçon of malice. 'Don't mind me, Larry; Tareling and I understand each other. Well, what then?'

'"But we must at once leave Melbourne. So please put the house immediately in Sibworth's hands, and make all your preparations for leaving on or before the 24th of this month."'

Ted gave a low whistle, and Laurette folded up the letter with an inimitable air of resignation.

'But if you go, then, what of Stella's visit?' said Ted, with folds in his brow.

'Stella's visit?' repeated Laurette absently. 'Oh, to be sure! To tell you the truth, my dear Ted, I am too much taken aback by the position to think much of anything beyond the domestic horizon. It is so sudden—yes, and unexpected—for if Talbot had had a little luck we should have paid off nearly all our little arrears; and then, of course, there would be the shearing in October.'

Laurette avoided allusion to the fact that this had been long ago discounted and the advance used up, and creditors appeased only with fictitious promises of payment after the shearing already disposed of.

'Of course you will see Stella at her own home, though I think there is something in the wind about her going abroad with Mrs. Raymond. It is to her I trace the rumour that has set Stella—— But there, I must not mix up things and other people's secrets!'

'Larry, you mustn't leave—you mustn't give up Monico Lodge till after September.'

'Ah, my dear boy, I would be only too happy, but it's beyond my power. It did flash across my mind that I would write and ask father; but now that you've explained about the rabbits and things——'

'But there are no rabbits at Strathhaye!'

Laurette looked wonderingly at her brother, and then a sudden light seemed to dawn on her.

'Oh, Ted, don't tempt me. I'll be honest. It isn't what would keep Monico Lodge going; but being so nearly connected with the Weavelows, we are in the swim of everything. I wouldn't undertake to stay for the rest of the season—not unless Talbot's aunt was kind enough to die, and he got the few thousand pounds for which he is down in her will. But she was always a cantankerous old cat. I dare say she'll live for fifteen years to come. And lately she has taken quite a passion for the Burmese. She helped to scud two missionaries among the Chins there, but they were eaten or something. I don't know whether they do eat them in Burmah; but at any rate she's going to send more. How old ladies of the aristocracy of England should send missionaries anywhere while the young men of their own class are what they are—and the old ones, too, for the matter of that!—but I dare say they know how hopeless it would be; whereas people that you never see, you can believe all sorts of romantic things about them, their conversions and things; and then, I suppose, wild creatures, who haven't got a stick of furniture or a shirt to their backs, can afford to be really Christianized.'

Laurette had taken up a seam from a work-basket near, and was sewing away most industriously, while she rambled on in this artless fashion. Ted rose abruptly, and, without saying a word, went to his own room. He returned presently, and Laurette noticed, with a beating heart, that he had a cheque-book in his hand.

He sat down at a davenport in the corner of the room, and wrote for a few minutes rapidly, blotted the cheque, and stood near his sister.

'Don't talk in that cold-blooded way about the old woman, Larry. I think you may always reckon that the Australian side of your clan will do more for you than the "English-nobility" side. Keep this as much as you can in your own hands; and, if you want it, you can have as much again at the end of September.'

With that, Ted put down the cheque before Laurette, and hastened to leave the room. It was for fifteen hundred pounds. It seemed to Ted that Larry didn't look at the amount at all, when she rose with a little exclamation of joy, intercepted him, and threw her arms round him.

'There, Larry, don't slobber! I think you ought to say your prayers for that old woman. It sticks in my gizzard entirely to hear people talk in that way of old people—grudging them their bit of tucker and their own fireside. Why, even the niggers never knocked the old ones on the head unless there was a big famine.'

With this little homily, Ted went out; and Laurette, hardly able to believe her senses, stared at the cheque with beaming eyes. She had hardly dared to hope for such complete success.

'As much again at the end of September!' But of course that was spoken in the elation of believing his suit was to prosper. Like a wary general, Laurette began to sum up the situation. She was secure against detection as to those excursions of the imagination she had dealt in till her brother and Stella met; and as far as Ted was concerned, probably altogether secure; for if that idiotic girl finally rejected him, that was the ultimate misfortune to him, and everything else would sink into insignificance. Stella would be the first to let the cat out of the bag; for if she were still obdurate, the first thing she would say, no doubt, would be: 'Now, Ted, I thought you had made up your mind that we were just to be friends. That is not the sort of thing friends say.' She mimicked her half aloud, and for the first time felt her smouldering dislike to the girl warm up to something like hatred. She was almost sure Stella would cheat her out of the other fifteen hundred pounds. Well, but it was good of Ted—at least good, considering he had never given her more than three or four hundred pounds at a time before. But, after all, a young man with about fifteen thousand a year: 'If we only had a run like Strathhaye instead of that desolate hole! Oh, thank God, we can stay in Melbourne after all!'

It may seem curious that one should thank God for the result of so much devious by-play and deception. But when we consider how a strong nation will attack a weaker one for no better motive than greed or ambition or the lust of tyranny, and then go to church en masse to chant the praises of the Almighty because tens of thousands of human beings have been slaughtered and tens of thousands of homes have been desolated and impoverished, the wonder of the solitary case diminishes. It is not safe to assume that the individual conscience is invariably less frayed than that of the collective nation.

CHAPTER XXVI.

The home-station of Lullaboolagana was one of those delightful places which at once convey an assurance of welcome, comfort and repose. It was partly of wood, partly stone, with additions that formed an irregular chronology of the past. The snug-looking detached cottage, with a billiard-room and two or three bedrooms, marked the season in which the number of sheep shorn touched fifty thousand. The addition with the gable end dated the year in which the little Courtlands first had a governess, etc., etc. The house had deep verandas round three sides. The roof, washed snow-white, so as to lessen the force of the summer sun, gleamed with a seductive cheerfulness and air of salutation among the encircling foliage. Several outbuildings at varying distances made the home-station look at a little distance like a miniature village. The wool-shed and shearers' house, with two or three huts, formed a second group of houses westward, beyond the confines of what was known as the Home Field. This consisted of over forty acres of land, which had been subjected to an artless form of landscape gardening by a relative of the Courtlands, who had left England under sentence of death from consumption, and had lived at Lullaboolagana for eighteen years, though it had been authoritatively predicted he could not survive the long sea-voyage. Here, then, he had employed his lease of semi-invalid life in testing the capabilities of Australian soil in growing trees and plants from widely-separated countries. Here, like Shenstone, though on a smaller scale, he planted groves and avenues and alleys, diversified his woods, pointed his walks, and entangled his shrubberies. The result was a charming semi-English milieu of the kind that the British race are so skilful in creating in the far regions of the earth, giving their dwelling-places under alien skies a touching resemblance to the old quiet homes in which their forefathers may have lived for many generations.

There were avenues on every side of the Home Field, composed chiefly of Italian pines, which in twenty years had attained a size almost incredible for that period. The Home Field was not closely planted. All over it there were wide open spaces between the groves and woodlets and groups of trees that embraced endless species, from the firs and pines of the north to the palms of the torrid zone, with a liberal proportion of Australian trees. Simplicity was certainly the governing taste, but combined with a blending of effects which, when perceived, added a new attraction. All round the house there were blossoming shrubs, rose-trees, and a great variety of flowers that kept up a procession of blooms year in, year out. The secret of perpetual spring in flowers is well-nigh solved by gardeners in the more favoured portions of Australia. There were several gentle hillocks in the Home Field, which lent themselves to landscape effects in a very agreeable manner. But the most charming natural feature of all was the creek known by its native name, the Oolloolloo. It meandered through the whole length of the Home Field. The orchard, which was half hidden in a deep little valley, lay in two unequal portions, one on each side of the creek. Its course was still marked by the tall eucalyptus-trees, seldom absent from the banks of creeks. Indeed, these trees never attain their finest development except by running water; and yet they have to live through centuries in waterless wastes. Is there not here something of the same curious contradiction that we find between the complex social etiquette of the aborigines and their very primitive stage of savagedom? It is often forced upon the observer of nature in Australia that in the past she has been playing strange pranks; among other trifles, brewing pepper for her children instead of nourishing them with milk.

But the eucalypti were far from being the only trees that grew by the Oolloolloo. Side by side with these natives of the primeval woods were copses of alders, overgrown bushes of sweetbriar, bamboos springing up tall and slender, and falling wide apart, making pictures against denser foliage like Japanese screens; here and there a hazel with its 'artless bower'; wide clumps of pampas grass, with their silky, flax-like blooms softly stirred by every breath of wind. Then one would come on a dense little grove of elms and native cherry-trees, mingled with scrub cypress—a combination which, of all others, makes the most alluring secular cloisters; a place in which to dream with open eyes; to catch phantasies by the wing; to read Shakespeare to one's self aloud; to muse, to brood, to meditate. Over all there was an enchanting air of leisure, of tranquil repose, which was heightened by the woods that lay on every side except to the south, where Minjah-Millowie, a township of seven or eight hundred inhabitants, extended in an irregular fashion within two miles of the Lullaboolagana home-station.

This was the direction the house fronted, and opposite to it there was a bridge across the Oolloolloo of solid masonry. It was the third that spanned the creek in the Home Field, but the only one that could be depended on when the winter rains were heavy, and the sluggish little creek, with its silent pools connected by a slender trickling thread of running water, was transformed into a rushing, turbid fury of a rivulet that filled the adjacent groves with its enchanting sound. The second bridge was an enormous gum-tree, which from time immemorial had lain across the creek as it fell, its great old withered branches extending over a hundred feet beyond the creek on the Home Field side of it. There were marks all along the upper side of this tree made by the stone axe of the aborigine, who had climbed it in quest of opossums, or to place his bark-enclosed dead among the boughs, or perhaps to scan the surrounding country for the little column of pale blue smoke that might proclaim the presence of a tribal foe not far off.

The third bridge, so called, was beneath a tall, slim white gum-tree, close to the orchard, and was a little rustic erection perched high up, completely covered on both sides with trailing creepers, conspicuous among them the wide-leaved passion-flower plant, now loaded with blossoms, scarlet and pale purple and white.

'What a graceful creature it is, garlanded with leaves and flowers,' said Stella, as she approached it with her sister-in-law the morning after her arrival. 'It looks like the beginning of a poem, or some place that should come into a story. Has nothing ever happened there?'

'Let me see. Hector and I often walk to and fro on it in the moonlight, when the nights are very warm.'

'Ah, if you were only lovers—that had to part, you know, Louise——'

'Thank goodness we are not!' laughed Louise.

'Not lovers? Oh, of course not—you are married people.'

'Well, Baby, you are as wicked as ever. I do like to hear Hector call you Baby. You see, though you may be very grown-up, and serious at times, Hector best remembers you as the baby of the household, when he left home twenty-one years ago. What ancient folk we are getting, to be sure!'

They had by this time reached the passion-flower bridge, which was provided with seats on each side, and was, indeed, much resorted to as a sort of outside sitting-room. It was a point of vantage, and commanded a good view of the country round. Eastward there were low ranges. Between those and Lullaboolagana lay one of the tracts of dead trees that in Australian scenery make up so weird a picture of desolation. It was known as the Wicked Wood, from some unknown aboriginal tradition. Looking steadily northward, one became sensible of a break in the distant woods that betokened the beginning of a great plain, which stretched many scores of miles in that direction.

'The Messmate Ranges, where I first saw a lyre-bird; the Wicked Wood, where only grass-trees and scorpions live; the Weeloo Plain, where a buggy seems to glide along like a boat—everything is just as it was over three years ago,' said Stella, looking around with glad recognition.

Here the sisters-in-law indulged in one of those long wandering and delightful chats possible only to people who have had interests in common for many years. This lasted till a servant came to announce that Mrs. and Miss Morton had called.

'My dear, how you have grown since I saw you!' were Mrs. Morton's first words as she kissed Stella. 'This is Julia; you did not see her when you were here—how many years since?'

'Oh, a dreadful long time ago,' said Stella; 'but not long enough for me to have grown, Mrs. Morton.'

'Oh, but positively you have, love,' said Mrs. Morton, surveying the new arrival with fond eyes.

She was a fair, stout woman, long past middle life, but endowed with one of those exuberantly kind natures which seem to defy the worst inroads of age. She certainly never wore a face of joy merely because she had been glad of yore. The annals of daily life almost invariably supplied her with food for wreathed smiles. Not that she was callous to the accidents that marred other people's pleasures, though mishaps of all sorts had hitherto been unfamiliar to her personally. Only, though she knew well how to mourn with the unfortunate, she made an offering to oblivion of all that bordered on sorrow in an incredibly short time. Still, no one unconnected with a local catastrophe took it to heart so thoroughly for a day and a half as Mrs. Morton did. And on this very occasion she gave proof of this.

'Oh, my dear, have you heard of the dreadful accident?' she said to Louise after a few casual remarks had been interchanged.

'No—what accident?' said Louise, a little startled by the concern depicted on Mrs. Morton's face as she spoke. It is curious how the people who feel the most acutely connect any show of deep concern with personal misadventure.

'Well, it was at Dr. Morrison's yesterday evening. We called at one of the Minjah shops on our way, and heard all about it. A man came in from the Bush with a fearful gumboil. Dr. Morrison found the tooth would have to come out. He put the man under chloroform, and extracted the tooth most successfully—but the man never got over it. The chloroform killed him. Oh, my dear, wasn't it dreadful?' and Mrs. Morton took out her handkerchief—not unnecessarily, for the tears were trickling down her cheeks.

'Oh, I am sorry—and poor dear Mrs. Morrison so easily upset, it would give her a dreadful shock,' said Louise.

'That is the best of using ether,' returned Mrs. Morton tearfully. 'If it hurts the patient it does not show till afterwards. But for a man to die under your hands—without getting away from you! Oh, it is so very shocking!'

'But, after all, mamma,' said her daughter, 'he was quite a common man, and very fond of drink.'

'Well, Julia, my dear, if you were his wife, or his mother, or his sister, that isn't the way you would speak,' said Mrs. Morton, wiping her eyes. 'It's of them I think.'

'But he didn't have any, mamma. He was just a knock-about hand on the Tarra-tarra Station.'

'Oh, my dear, not have a mother? how thoughtless you are. If Dr. Langdale had been there, I cannot help thinking he would have seen the man couldn't stand chloroform.'

'But isn't Dr. Langdale there? He was here the day before yesterday, and didn't say a word of leaving for any length of time.'

'He is at Nareen, staying with the Kenleighs. You know, they worship the ground he walks on since he performed that wonderfully successful operation on Mark.'

'Do you think he'll really stay in Australia, Mrs. Courtland?' said Miss Morton.

'I do not know,' answered that lady; 'I am afraid not. You see, it was not to stay he came, but for a year's change and rest.'

'But then he's always writing—he must be writing a book,' said the young lady. 'I asked Mrs. Morrison the other week whether he wasn't, but she only shook her head and smiled. I don't know why some people are so fond of making secrets of things. Either he is or he is not. Why shouldn't she say "Yes" or "No"?'

'Perhaps she doesn't really know,' answered Louise, smiling. She knew that anything in the nature of a secret was abhorrent to Miss Morton, who loved nothing so well as talking of other people's affairs, except talking of her own. She was a tall, good-looking young woman of twenty-five, with large brown eyes, a brilliant complexion, and that stamp of figure which milliners call 'stylish.'

The visitors stayed for many hours in the friendly leisurely fashion of neighbours in the Bush, who are separated by fifteen miles of unpeopled woods. Miss Morton had three weeks previously returned from a visit to her brother, Mr. John Morton, coming back by way of Melbourne, where she had stayed a couple of days with Mrs. Tareling.

'I would have seen you there,' she said to Stella, 'only you were so long in coming. Laurette thought you were going to give her up altogether. What a dear Laurette is, to be sure!'

To this Stella assented, in the facile way in which we all help to swell social fictions.

'I do not feel as if I remembered much of my new sister-in-law. Is Helen like Julia at all?' Stella asked a little hesitatingly, after the Mortons had gone.

'Not much. Helen takes more after her father. Not but what Mrs. Morton is the dearest and kindest of women. You will like Helen, dear,' said Louise, who was essentially one of the peacemakers of life, who not only prophesy smooth things, but help materially to bring them to pass.

'And who is this Dr. Langdale you all conspire to——'

'Now, Stella, I warn you to say nothing disparaging,' said Louise, laughing. 'Dr. Langdale is an immense favourite with us here. You are sure to see him as soon as he returns from Nareen. He strolls across from Dr. Morrison's house in Minjah Millowie most days in the afternoon, when his writing for the day is over. He does write, for Hector told me. You know how slowly Hector makes friends.'

'Does he? You see, I really know very little of Hector and Claude.'

'I always forget that. Of course, you see them only at long intervals, and for a short time. Well, it's about five or six months since Dr. Langdale came. He had been in the other colonies some little time. He and Hector became great cronies almost at once. He is related to the Morrisons. We heard a good deal about him before he arrived. He has inherited a pretty good income, and does not need to work for his living. But he always had a great liking for the medical profession. He is much interested, too, in all sorts of social questions. He had an appointment in a large London hospital; in fact, he has never practised anywhere else. He previously held a merely honorary post there for two or three years. Then an uncle—a great physician in the West End—died, and his son wished Dr. Langdale to enter on a partnership with him. Before deciding on this, he came away for a year's rest and change.'

'How old is he?'

'About thirty-one, only, like most Englishmen, he looks younger, at least as compared with Australians. But he isn't all English; he is German on the mother's side.'

'Indeed! What is he like?'

'Now, Stella, you are interested. You do so love the Germans. I know you will like Dr. Langdale, if only for that reason.'

'Yes; and because you are giving me such a vivid description of him,' said Stella, laughing. The soft flush in her cheeks would have shown one who knew her that she was more interested than she chose to appear.

'Well, I'll do my best, only the moment you see him you'll say——'

'Oh, here you are, both gossiping away nineteen to the dozen! Well, Baby, are you tired from your journey yesterday? After all, you are really quite grown up.'

It was Hector Courtland who made this little speech, standing in the doorway of the drawing-room, where his wife and sister were seated, with Lionel, the eldest boy, just then an invalid, on a couch, buried in the enchanted pages of the 'Arabian Nights.' Courtland was a tall spare man, with that slight stoop which tall men, who are in the saddle often ten hours out of the twenty-four, are apt to acquire. He was bronzed with the sun and constant exposure to all sorts of weather. He was barely forty, but his dark-brown hair, beard, and moustache were plentifully sprinkled with gray. His face, when in repose, was grave almost to sadness, and he would often pass hours without uttering a word. These are some of the characteristics of a life passed in the Bush from early manhood. Courtland had been at Eton three years, when sudden and disastrous reverses, coupled with failing health, led his father to decide on leaving England for Australia. No one who knew Hector Courtland when he left Eton—a lad of seventeen—would have prognosticated that he would become grave, silent, and uumirthful long before he reached the uplands of middle age. But there are probably few natures which are not profoundly modified by a semi-Carthusian existence during the most susceptible years of life.

'You look tired, Hector. Wouldn't you like a cup of tea?' said his wife.

'Yes, a quart potful. Some sheep got boxed up at the seven-mile hut, and we had a high old time of it drafting them. Well, Liny, what are you doing, young man?'

'Reading about Sindbad the Sailor, father. Do you know that Aunt Stella can tell stories just like a book?'

'No; I never heard her. What sort of stories?'

'The one she told me this morning was about strange people who live always in the woods.'

'What kind of people, my boy?'

'Well, when they are in the sunshine they are all light. When they are in the moonshine, it goes through them, so you must step very gently, and follow them till they get into the shadow; and when they are in shadow, you cannot tell them from the darkness.'

'Then it seems you do not see them at all?'

'No, father, never; and all the time they are there doing the strangest things. They catch falling stones and toss them back into the sky, and there they give more light than fever, and don't fall down any more. They take old bits of dead bark and make them into butterfly wings, with gold and purple spots on them. When an old log is burnt up they make the little geraniums, that smell so sweet, out of the ashes. They never go to sleep, and they never stop working, and they are never tired and never seen, and they never let the tiniest scrap of anything go to waste.'

The father listened with smiling seriousness to these wonders of the wood. Later on he pleaded to be among the audience when Stella told twilight stories to the children, and he would listen with profound interest to the mystical events and subtle fancies that rose to 'Baby's' lips with tireless vivacity. She certainly had something of the improvisatrice in her, for never, except when she threw the reins on fancy's neck in speaking, did such winged words, luminous reaches of imagination, and quick touches of pathos come to her. Sometimes, when the grave elder brother listened, he would almost question whether this could be the merry little child with wide open eyes who had been the baby among them all when he left home. She had in a manner remained 'Baby' to him ever since.

There is something pathetic in the way that those who are most closely related may come to be entire strangers. When we are in daily communion we inevitably weave fancies one concerning the other, which stand to us in place of knowledge. But all the time—between not only dumb natures, but those most subtly gifted with utterance—there is that baffling, inexorable wall of division, that unfathomed abyss in which each human soul is shrouded from the cradle to the grave.

CHAPTER XXVII.

It might seem at first sight that station life in Australia must be a very slow and dull kind of existence. As a rule, the centres of civilization are far off, the nearest neighbours many miles away; and the ordinary modes of amusement, balls, parties, opera, and theatre-going, etc., are unknown. To many, no doubt, a life so cut off from external excitement would seem a very maimed and incomplete affair. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that all the most healthful forms of recreation, as opposed to pleasure-seeking, are opened to squatting life. There are books and magazines to read, buggies to drive in, horses to ride, visits to be received and paid, and all the engrossing interests of family life for the women-folk. For the men there is the ceaseless round of duties, which are on the whole not more monotonous than the calling of average professional men, and less arduous, after the early struggles are over, than most other forms of work. And, then, who has lived for years encircled by great woods without finding that these unpeopled spaces exercise a fascination, all their own, over the mind? The tranquil gullies, in which the slender, stringy bark-trees grow so thick that every sun-ray is intercepted; the scrubby ranges, which the radiant epacris sometimes turn into a mass of colour; the swamps, with their wide, gray-green fringe of reeds and rushes and flocks of water-fowl, that come to them in straggling lines from far districts that have become waterless; the treeless plains, that stretch like a mimic ocean to the verge of the far horizon; the swelling hills, that break the monotony of well-timbered, undulating country; the sombre vegetation, the gleam of brilliant desert flowers, the calls and songs of birds, all have a charm of their own, and rise up in the memory of the Australian exile with an allurement which he never finds in the crowded cities—nay, not even in the scenery of the Old World.

Stella took very kindly to station life. She found it delightful to be so closely neighboured by the great unmeasured woods of her native land. She even regretted that the township of Minjah Millowie was so near. The views she liked best were those that swept the woods to the north and west, where one might travel on and on for days without striking any signs of human habitation. Next day she was on the passion-flower bridge, alternately absorbed in Keats and in looking across the Home Field and the stirless masses of foliage beyond, when she heard approaching footsteps. She turned, to find herself face to face with her unknown partner at the Emberly ball.

'Miss Stella! Is it possible?' he said in a delighted tone.

They shook hands cordially.

'I believe I know your name now,' said Stella laughingly.

'Oh! it is Langdale. Did you not know that night?'

'No; but since I came here things I have heard of you made me believe that Dr. Langdale and you were one and the same.'

He laughed with beaming eyes at this division of his individuality.

'Well, I knew you were Miss Stella; and now, I suppose, I may add to that, Courtland? This is another stroke of good luck—not so fleeting, I hope, as the first. By the way, should I not ask whether you have got over the fatigues of the ball?'

'Oh yes! This is the day after.'

'Only, I suppose, you would say it was one of the thirty-six tragic situations of life that one can never really make believe?'

'You still remember our little debate?'

'Surely. Tell me, do you still think of the "Kritik of Pure Reason" when the hair-dresser comes before you are going to a ball?'

She laughed merrily, and then said seriously:

'Do you know, I haven't been to any ball half so nice since.'

'And I haven't been to any at all. But they are not much in my line. I wonder if that exquisite Tasmanian tree-fern is still flourishing?'

'No; it died next morning of pure chagrin.'

'I am sorry to hear that. But why?'

'Because someone near it began an anecdote about Heine, and then went away without telling it. If there is anything in the world a Tasmanian tree-fern cannot brook it is an interrupted anecdote.'

'Well, I felt it a great misfortune that your partners discovered you; but I didn't know the tree-fern sympathized with me. Shall I tell you that little story?'

'Please. I have often since tried to imagine what it was.'

'It was told to my mother by an old lady who knew Heine. She visited him one dull day in November, a little over two years before his death. She found him spent with pain, that had defied his sleeping potion all through the night. But he was propped up on his mattress-grave, writing on a tablet. He said it was a poem, which, like life, had turned into a bad joke on his hands—too long for wit, and too pathetic for the publishers. It was the story of a peasant-boy from the Thuringian woods, who had climbed mountain-peaks for edelweiss, gathered violets before sunrise, who, with tears in their eyes, told him why their petals were the same in number as the eggs of the swallows, and other weighty secrets; a boy who made love to the stars at night, and watched a maiden spinning till he believed that he was a poet. He came to Paris—the beautiful heathen Circe, who slays her lovers by thousands with the simples she culls with a brazen sickle by moonlight. But her simples had no power over the peasant-boy. He played woodland melodies on his oaten pipe early and late, but no one heeded him. Then he fell ill, and longed even to death for a sight of his native woods, but most of all for one of the white violets that Gretchen used to wear at her throat. Then the evil spirit came to him one midnight, and offered him a white violet for one of two trifles—a song or his soul. The boy had no longer the power to make a song in the cruel city that had broken his heart, so he gave his soul. He held the flower against his lips, but when the dawn crept into his garret he saw that the violet was a purple one, bleached with brimstone. Then without a word he turned his face to the wall and died. They say he looked so young and beautiful that Beelzebub himself shed tears. "I do not believe this part of the story, however," said Heine, "for in that case he would give up pinching my nerves with red-hot pincers in the night when Mathilde is asleep, and there is no one to drive him away." Of course, much is always lost when a thing of that kind is repeated from one to the other; but that is the little anecdote as my mother told it me, as nearly as I can recollect.'

'Well, I think it has Heine's cachet on it. Poor Heine, it seems like a peep into his room where he lay so cruelly long!'

'Yes, it was a bitter period—those lingering years—when, as he said in one of his letters, he was no life-enjoying, somewhat comely Greek any more, who would laugh merrily at morose Nazarenes; but only a poor Jew, sick to death; a wasted picture of sorrow; an unhappy man.'

'What a crown of thorns life has for the most part offered to the goldenest-mouthed singers.'

'That is true; but we must not forget that they themselves plaited the thorns too often, just as we other ordinary mortals do.'

'Ah, but they suffer more; they have less "certainty of waking bliss." Genius has never been truly acclimatized in the world. The Philistines always long to put out the eyes of poets, and make them grind corn at Gaza.'

There was a touch of scorn in Stella's voice and a light in her eyes which were not lost on her companion, who, indeed, found an evident pleasure in looking at her, as well as hearing her speak.

'But you must not forget that poets are by nature very vocal, and able to record their joys and woes with cunning effect. Now take the dumb, patient way in which the poor—women among them, especially—suffer. It is nothing uncommon to find a woman has been enduring acute pain at intervals for years, and all the time going about her work as if nothing were the matter, and saying very little about it. That, to my mind, is true heroism. If a poet could ever suffer in the same way, for a month, say—ye gods! what despairing odes—what declamatory appeals to an unrighteous Heaven!'

'You talk almost like a heretic.'

'Perhaps I say what appears to me true; that is often the worst sort of heresy.'

'But surely not if your truth is really true,' said Stella, with an arch smile.

'Ah, that is a burning question,' returned Langdale, with an answering smile. 'But without going into the more serious aspect of affairs—though we should not choose to be in error—yet are there not many things in which illusions help people more than the truth? Isn't that perhaps one reason why things, as they are, remain for the most part so carefully masked?'

'I must think over that before I commit myself. But about the poets; isn't it their vocation to see the "passionate expression" not only in the face of all science, but to put into words what others dumbly endure? When Shelley says:

'"I could lie down like a tired child

And weep away this life of care,

Which I have borne and still must bear,"

he was speaking not only for himself, but for multitudes who have had the same feeling, but lacked all gift of expression.'

'That just points what I wanted to say. A feeling of that kind is, after all, fleeting; it takes up but a small part of a working day, and a working day is, on the whole, a hopeful one. Only the things that make it so would not produce a lyrical cry.'

'That sounds so reasonable; it is more provoking than a downright attack.'

'No; but really it is so. Think what it takes of endeavour, of effort, to make up one day of this world's life. Most of this may be called downright drudgery. Things that have to be done over and over again, in almost exactly the same way, simply because people need three meals a day. And yet the work done has its own interest to each healthy individual.'

'What, to the women who make buttonholes all their lives, and make dolls' arms for a shilling the hundred dozen; to the men who break stones for the road, and work in gangs in factories and mines underground?'

'Do not forget,' said Langdale with a smile, 'that you are thinking of these monotonous employments with a highly sensitized imagination. And even when the work is in far more imaginative grooves—when it brings the mind into touch with things that do not pass away with the using—how much more effective for poetry is the reaction, the mistrust, the vague disappointment, than the moderate satisfaction at moderate success—the feeling of expectation and looking on, and waiting for what is to follow, which, after all, give their zest to the average days of existence?'

'Well, are we to come back to the old idea of banishing poesy because it is misleading?'

'By no means. Only I think we do not enough realize its tendency to heighten what is sad in life—often, I think, to exaggerate it. It isn't the people who have most to do with life that write criticisms on it. And in all criticisms there is a heightening and a deepening. It is the craft of the ready writer.'

'You make me think of an expression people often use when anything dreadful happens—"It is like a dream." And yet the worst things always happen when we are wide awake. Still, I feel the force of what you say about the poor. I have often been struck with the uncomplaining, almost stoical, way in which they take misfortune.'

'Yes, one cannot help being struck with it. "It does feel rather bad," they will say, when "intolerable agony" would be our only adequate expression for what they are enduring. And how simply often they face death. "I wouldn't mind going, if it weren't for the children," I have heard poor, long-suffering women say over and over again. What a sinewy, insinuating expression for passing away from all that we know. There is no art of the rhetorician here—of the shoemaker who can make a great shoe for a little foot.'

The two had left the passion-flower bridge by this time, and were slowly sauntering through the Home Field towards the house. It was the afternoon of one of those perfect Australian days in which the sky is widely vaulted in a dome of crystalline clearness; the horizons so indefinitely enlarged that the limiting-lines are beyond sight; the world overflowing with sunshine, as though day had been added to day; while a cool westerly breeze was blowing, that stirred the boughs into jocund sprightliness, and revealed in the searching light how large the buds were growing on the limes and birches, and all the old-world trees that lose their foliage in winter.

'You almost tempt me to think that it is more poetical to be "to dumb forgetfulness a prey" than to interpret nature and our own hearts to us,' said Stella. 'But still, I suppose you do love the poets a little?'

'Fortunately I have got a voucher with me,' he returned laughingly, and pulled a small brown volume of Molière out of his pocket.

'Ah! that is one of the beloved among the classics. One reads him each time as if afresh—for the first time.'

'Yes. As I walked from Minjah Millowie I laughed over Harpagon's instructions to his servants to conceal the defects of their liveries as if I had never read them before. Is there anyone else who has the secret of touching the springs of laughter so irresistibly? And it isn't so much with broad effects, or even the finer point of wit, but the perpetual play of the human comedy—the ironical surprises life has in store for us.'

'You make me long to steal the volume from you. I don't think I have read "L'Avare" for years.'

'Suppose we exchange? I know Keats very imperfectly. This is just the atmosphere in which to read him. Now, that is a sort of pledge of friendship,' he said, as they exchanged books.

'Yes, so it is,' answered Stella heartily.

'Do you know, I often wondered if we should meet again,' he went on. 'I quite made up my mind that we might be friends if we did, if you will forgive such boldness.'

'So did I,' returned Stella frankly; and she recalled her conversation with her sister at Coonjooree.

'Thank you very much,' he returned, with a simple cordiality which was a marked trait in his manner. 'I foresee that we shall quarrel occasionally,' he continued gaily, a little afterwards.

'Yes; there is an exasperating reasonableness about you,' she said, with a soberness only belied by the dancing light in her eyes, 'and that must breed mischief sometimes. I suppose it comes of your belonging to two old civilizations firmly rooted in the past.'

He maintained his gravity till her eyes betrayed her, and then they laughed together.

'You have a way of taking temporary rises out of me which you must expect to hear of again,' he said; and this threat made food for more laughter.

And then at that moment Louise, accompanied by two or three little ones, came in sight among the trees.

'What will my sister-in-law think?' said Stella, with an amused smile. 'She does not know we are old friends.'

What Louise thought as she approached the two was that they looked extremely companionable. Stella was attired in a close-fitting cream-coloured cashmere, with a cluster of passion-flowers at her throat, and a broad straw hat looped up at one side with the same flowers. A smile hovered about her lips, and as she talked her long thick lashes and dark slender eyebrows heightened the radiance of her eyes and cheeks.

Her companion was little over a head taller, with a muscular, well-formed figure. His eyes were dark gray, his head and brow strikingly noble—an air well maintained by the rest of the face, more especially the finely-moulded chin and mouth, whose short upper lip was defined rather than hidden by a silky black moustache. His hair was of the same colour; his skin a clear olive tint.

'I do not think I need offer to introduce you to one another,' said Louise, smiling.

'Well, no. We have just been finishing a talk we began the day after I landed in Australia,' said Langdale. And then Louise was speedily told all there was to tell.

'You were sitting on the passion-flower bridge, then, when you met Dr. Langdale?' said Louise afterwards, when the two were alone. 'Well, something has happened there at last. For don't you think, under the circumstances, it was almost an event?'

'Oh yes, it was an event; for we are going to be friends.'

Louise might smile covertly, and feel as sceptical as people usually are regarding friendship pure and simple between an attractive young woman and a man barely eight years her senior. But Stella, who was weary of being made love to, found this prospect of friendship very alluring; and from the first moment she met him something which she could feel, though not define, made her feel sure that Langdale was a man capable of being an intimate friend without degenerating into a lover.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

There come epochs in some lives to which the thoughts in all after-years return with infinite tenderness, and a vague wonder that, in an existence so beset with common pleasures and turmoils and disillusions, there should be this tranquil sanctuary by which always there seem to glide the sweet waters of Siloe that go with silence. Such a period for Stella were the weeks that followed. The spring was an unusually lovely one—calm, overflowing with sunshine, and yet cool. Our Australian woods do not greatly brighten or darken at the approach of any season. And the monotony of form and colour must often deepen the tendency of all well-known objects to fail in making us apprehend our surroundings with eyes quickened by imaginative insight. But here at Lullaboolagana there were groves and little woods of European trees, whose bare branches were starred with leaf-buds that swelled from day to day in the liberal sunlight and the kindly air, making the heart beat with involuntary gladness at their revelation of the dawn of returning youth. This miracle, perpetually renewed, of vegetable life so largely drawn from unseen material, has a subtle power to draw the mind into wondering conjecture as to presences, unknown as well as unseen, which may be all around and near us.

It seemed to Stella as if she fully felt for the first time the mystical significance of this ceaseless throb of returning vigour. And then the growing intimacy with a mind equipped by training and natural endowments, with a keen apprehension of the more novel forces that are moulding thought and life in the present day—equipped, too, with a calmer, more assured outlook on life than had yet dawned on her introspective, more apprehensive nature, seemed in a delightful way to realize that ideal of friendship she found so attractive. They had so much in common, and yet they were so wide apart. And this led them often far afield in talk which, though at first chiefly impersonal, yet led to a growing sympathy. This may be better realized by recording, though imperfectly, some of the talk that passed between them on successive occasions.

The second time they met at Lullaboolagana was on the wide western veranda closed with a thick screen of creepers, where Stella sat sewing beside her little invalid nephew.

'I wish you had come in time to hear Aunt Stella's story of the little lost angel,' said the boy.

'Well, hadn't you better tell it to me, Liny?' said Langdale coaxingly.

Lionel, nothing loath—he was one of the children who like to tell a story almost as much as to hear one—told in his own way the strange adventures of a little angel who, viewing the earth a long way off, fell in love with it and came to see it closer. He could fly down easily, but his wings were not strong enough to bear him back. There was a little cottage in the woods, in which a girl and her mother lived. The girl found the little angel, wet with the dew and blue with the cold, and brought him home. When his wings had dried, the mother plucked most of the feathers out to stuff a pillow with them. This grieved the angel so much that he wandered off to the woods, and sat in a very lonely place waiting for his wings to grow again. But the dragon-flies deafened him with their buzzing, the crows tried to peck his eyes out, and at last an emu put sand over him, so that he might be hatched like one of her own chicks.

'That is all,' said the boy. 'Aunt Stella won't say whether the angel grew its wings or was choked. I think myself the sand would smother it—or make it blind. Poor dear little angel!'

'I wonder why your aunt told you such a dofeful story as that?' said Langdale, speaking to the boy, but looking at the culprit, who showed no signs of repentance.

'Are you of the same persuasion as my sister Louise?' said Stella. 'When she tells the children stories they are lightened of all disasters—even "The Babes in the Wood" have a happy time in the end.'

'Well, don't you think the chief justification of stories is that they are pleasanter than the worst that may happen?'

'Do you really think so?' said Stella, looking very sceptical.

'Yes, I do. I have a grievance on this point. I am fond of novels—English and French—and always have been. Now, if you begin to read stories at eight, by the time you get to be thirty-one you are at the mercy of contemporaries for fiction. Oh, I assure you, some of my contemporaries who write novels would fare very badly if they fell into my hands. What doleful evenings they have given me, when the day's work was over, and I have sat down in solitude, proposing to forget problems and maladies and the imbecile people who so constantly beset us in life! But, no! the modern novelist, instead of taking the good the gods provide us in wholesome cheerful lives, shows invention in nothing but incredible disasters. If they give us anything new, it is in the way of fools and diseases and villains, and every conceivable shade of human meanness.'

'While all the time you want a glorified Arcadia, where all the good people are happy and the wicked ones either overthrown or turned from the evil of their ways?'

'Or why don't you say ignored? Think how intolerable human society would be if people were not agreed to ignore a great deal, and rightly so.'

'I do wish you would give me some idea of what your favourite novels should be. At present—what between hiding away the misery of life and ignoring the evil of it—I can only think of fairy tales with the fairies left out.'

'Well, you amuse me. Here are you, quite evidently blessed with a physique without flaw—with all your time to spend in the way that seems best to you—with money, position and friends, and a healthy capacity of enjoyment—and yet you affect to believe that books cannot be real unless they are waking nightmares of misadventure.'

'But how could a tale be made that anyone would read out of good health and immunity from destitution? Not that I am one of those happy beings; for I am awfully poor,' said Stella.

'Are you really?' said Langdale, looking curiously at the pale pink crêpe de chine which was one of Stella's favourite materials of wear.

'Yes; I have only thirteen pounds a quarter for everything.'

'What, for rent and food and the incidence of taxation? You must manage very well.'

'Oh, you are laughing at me! Of course I mean for my clothing.'

'And do you mean to say you are poor upon that?'

'Yes; the worst of all poverty, debt. My note-book is full of entries, in my brother Tom's handwriting: "Lent this day to Stella, five pounds; to be paid again to me when she can. I say five pounds!"'

'That has a very business-like sound,' said Langdale, smiling.

'Oh yes; and after these notes I also write: "I owe unto Tom five pounds, lawful money of Australia, which I did borrow of him. Heaven grant he may get it back." But this is a digression.'

'Not at all, as far as I am concerned,' answered Langdale, speaking quite gravely, but with a lurking smile in his eyes. 'A young lady who has fifty-two pounds a year and sundry pound-notes for mere dresses and ribbons, and yet is desperately poor, is just fit to be a member of that growing fraternity of malcontents who are so ready to rail at Nature and Providence.'

'Now you are quite mistaken,' said Stella, with equal gravity. 'It was only yesterday afternoon I saw a laughing-jackass swoop down and swallow a great, blind-worm that Dunstan, our gardener, turned over, and yet I asked neither Providence nor Nature a single question. It was an ugly creature, and I was quite content it should be gobbled up out of sight.'

This delicate insinuation that, when we find little to complain of in life, it is because we ourselves are protected from the worst barbs of misfortune, was not lost on Langdale.

'But then an angel is higher up in the scale—nearer to our own sacred caste of humanity,' he said with a quiet smile; 'and so you protest against accident to one of these by making a poignant little tale out of its disasters. How characteristic that is of so much of our modern literature, which piles up often the outward accidents of existence and all the time leaves out its very kernel.'

'Tell me what you think is left out.'

'Life itself. The strong warm instinct of clinging to the earth even when its harvests do not whiten fully to allay our hunger—the instinct that makes the man who has writhed in pain through the night carry food in trembling spoonfuls to his lips in the morning, while a glow of thankfulness rises in his heart because he yet lives to see the light of day—ah! it is a subtle ensnaring game, this life of ours. And to most—I am sure of it—the very fact of being alive is a good that outweighs the bitterest evils.'

'And yet you have been so often in the presence of the terrors of life. In London there must be swarms of people about whom everyone must feel it would be better if they never saw the light. It seems to me that in hospitals and poor-houses a doctor must often feel that death rather than life would be the great boon.'

'I am afraid you will think I am very callous,' said Langdale with a smile; 'but such a thought has very seldom forced itself on me; and when it has, I have rejected it as treasonable. I dare say you are right. Habit may engender a bias on the side of life apart from its conditions. Fortunately for us, we have only to take one part at a time in the stage of life.'

'Yes, you are concerned with pulling a man through, not with the question whether it is worth while. Now, I am one of the lookers-on at the play. I do not hold a retaining fee on one side or the other, and so I perceive how unmoral this ardour for prolonging this existence really is.'

Stella spoke with extreme gravity; but seeing that Langdale really thought she was in earnest, she could not refrain from laughter.

'It is very charitable of you to assume that this ardour for keeping people in life counts for so much,' he said, smiling. 'But, joking aside,' he added after a pause, 'there is an absorbing interest often in watching how incredibly near a human being may draw to the unknown bourne, and yet struggle back to health once more. What is the subtlety of man compared to the subtlety of Nature? someone has said. And Nature is in nothing so subtle as the extraordinary rallies she makes on the side of life. And thus, in a great crisis, when one pang of remorse or a dark foreboding as to the future might turn the scales against recovery, the senses are wrapped in unconsciousness as impenetrable as that of early childhood.'

'You make me feel that a struggle against death might be more entertaining to watch than the life that followed.'

'But when you are a little older you will find that the great thing is the game itself,' returned Langdale, with the frank, catching smile characteristic of him; 'the endless interaction of motive and expectation, of work and play, of the wider outlook on human affairs, which is so distinctive of modern days, lend the world an interest that outbalances its dreariness.'

'Yes; as long as we do not try to peer below the surface,' returned Stella half smilingly.

'And then,' went on Langdale, 'there is a strong element of opéra bouffe in the world, apart from moral or deeply serious considerations; so much interplay that lightens work.'

'Even in the wards of a hospital?'

'Yes. I had to laugh as I rode out yesterday, recalling a case that was admitted into our casual ward a week or two before I left hospital. It was a man who had been run over, and whose head was badly hurt. It appears he had been drinking for some time. He explained to me, as he was getting better, that he was a poet, whose ideas would flow only under alcoholic stimulant. This unfortunate accident made him lose the thread of a great epic, which would have made his fame. "Oh! what was it—what was it?" he would say, and then he would implore me to help to recover his epic. It was a theme colossal in its grandeur, and yet full of pathos and interest. I suggested heaven and hell. "Ah! don't you see, that when people have ceased to hope for one or fear the other, such a theme is impossible. Besides," he said, "the critics would at once say I was imitating Dante and Milton." Then I said, "A great monarch—one dethroned," etc. "A monarch!" he said, in a tone of disdain, "a creature that nowadays has either to ape the manners of the common herd, or keep himself locked up like a criminal!" "Woman?" then I said in despair. "Oh, woman—woman, who broke my head, and has storied the prophets in every age——" he replied, beginning to sob.'

They both laughed at this reminiscence. Then Mrs. Courtland and the governess joined them, and the conversation became general.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Three weeks of Stella's visit at Lullaboolagana had passed, when her brother Claude and his young wife returned from their travels. It had been arranged that they were to live at the head station a year or two before starting an establishment on their own account. Mrs. Claude was a good-looking, vivacious young woman, who, as is the wont of travellers, had brought back many tales of the countries she had seen. They had spent February and March in England among relations on both sides, and this, on the whole, was the part of their foreign experience which oftenest afforded themes of reminiscence.

'Some days would begin bright,' she would say, 'and then all at once a fog would come on. After peering into the sky for some time you would find the sun in the most awkward position, looking for all the world like an old worn-out rose-coloured platter. But even when there was no fog you would think the sky was coming down on top of you. It was so awfully low and dark, and all the trees shivering—I used to long to put a petticoat on the poor things. And at Uncle Courtland's rectory in Devonshire I found a little blue gum trying to live. Oh dear, I nearly cried over it.'

'Why? well, you must have been homesick!' said Louise.

'Well, I don't know—but at any rate I was very dull. They went to church so often, and I felt I ought to go too. One of the girls had been to Girton, and she is a little like Stella in some things—but the rest seem to look on her as a pagan.... I couldn't believe you had more sunshine here than you liked. You begin to understand why English people laugh so little.'

'But do they?' questioned Stella, who was listening and sewing by a French window that opened on the veranda. 'I think all the English people I have known laughed as much as we do; and what other nation has produced such humorists?'

'Oh yes, long ago. Now they laugh most when they are here—like Dr. Langdale. I should think there must be millions of women in England who never laughed out in all their lives. I suppose that's why they take everything so seriously. If you're five minutes late for breakfast they look at you as if you had stabbed the cook—or worse; for they would say a cook can be replaced, but if you waste the time you can never get it back.'

'You see, dear, we get rather lax ideas of punctuality in the long hot summers,' said Louise apologetically.

'Oh, my goodness! how I should like to see some of our relations there—panting on their bedroom floors instead of seeing that everyone is at the table to the minute! Such a fuss over wasting the time! Claude says it's part of "le cant Anglais." What better can you do when the sun never shows himself?'

'You speak as though you had been rather in a wet blanket there,' said Stella, smiling, 'and found the people rather agaçant. Now, I think nice English people are the nicest of all.'

'Yea, in Australia, away from the rest,' said Nell, with a sparkle in her eyes; 'but a houseful gets upon the nerves—and as for a whole country full of them, nothing but the thought of leaving it for Australia, say, keeps you up. I can see you don't take that in quite; but wait till you go there, Stella. I don't believe you would stay two days at your uncle's. They are for ever talking of church and the anti-Unionists.'

No doubt Mrs. Claude could have enlarged eloquently on the subject had it not been cut short by the entrance of her mother and sister Julia, who were speedily followed by Dr. Langdale. He stayed only a few minutes, however, being on his way to Nareen, and having merely called with a book for Stella. Mrs. Morton could never see Dr. Langdale without entering on conjectures as to whether he might not settle in Victoria, instead of returning to London when his year was up.

'We do so need good doctors in this country,' she said; 'and really the young men who take their degrees in Melbourne and Sydney seem anxious to cut people up just out of curiosity to see what's inside them.'

There was a general laugh at this, but Mrs. Morton did not speak in a joking spirit.

'Indeed, girls, it is true. There was that young Dr. Jones at Warracootie. Not a fowl could they keep. He was trying to invent a liver pill, and used to try its effects on hens and ducks. They all died in convulsions. He said it was in the sacred cause of science and humanity—but surely it's better to have your own eggs fresh laid. And then, if he knew as much about the liver as he should, would his pills act in that way?'

'But, for all we know, Dr. Langdale may be engaged to be married, and obliged to return,' said Miss Morton, and she managed to watch Stella's face as she spoke. But she did not glean anything from the survey. Then Mrs. Claude, who knew the rather callous way in which her sister was prone to investigate and thresh out any subject that interested her, changed the conversation. But the subject was one on which Miss Morton was conscious of an aching void for information, and next Sunday, when Claude and his wife were spending the day at Broadmead, the Morton station, Miss Julia returned to the subject again.

She was a young woman who took her prospect of settling in life, as she would have called it, very seriously. It was now nearly three years and a half since she and Mr. Ritchie had been, as she thought, on the verge of becoming engaged. She had had frequent opportunities of meeting him during her visits to her brother and his wife, Ted's elder sister. She believed that Ted still admired her a good deal—that she formed, in fact, a sort of second string to his bow, which he would soon fall back on, if only he were finally convinced that Stella was not to be won, or, better still, if Stella married. This was a calculating, not to say mercenary, way of looking upon marriage for a good-looking young woman of twenty-five. But we sometimes forget that the freedom of choice in marriage, which it permitted to women of the Anglo-Saxon race, has the effect of making some of them regard the institution on cool business principles. It is an 'arrangement' made by themselves, instead of by the mothers, as in France. Indeed, no French mother could go to work in a more disenchanted way in this respect than a certain type of Australian girl. 'I am getting on in life,' she will say, examining the corners of her eyes and the parting of her hair critically. And then she counts over the number of eligible men in her circle, and makes a mental tick against the name of the one who combines most money with good looks. If he dies, or marries the wrong woman, the process of ticking has to be gone over again.

But to do Miss Morton justice, affection, though not of an absorbing nature, had something to do with her designs on Ted Ritchie. She could readily have loved him, and would much sooner have married him than, say, the dissipated younger son of an English peer, as her friend Laurette had done. She had, indeed, during the period when Ted seemed seriously bent on coming to the point, discarded a local suitor, who was quite as wealthy as the recreant knight, but twenty years older, and with a fringe of crimson hair scantily surrounding a singularly flat crown. His eyes, too, were of the protruding order, and his chin fell away a good deal. Altogether, he had very much the look of a frog that has lived through many winters. Still, he had fifteen thousand a year, and such an income always placed a marriage above the odious category of scratch matches. But he was a shy sort of creature, and seemed to have taken a woman's 'No' as being final. He would doubtless require unmistakable tokens of goodwill to bring him to the point once more. Now, though Miss Morton was not romantic in her disposition, though she had started in life with few ideals, while those that she had were of a tough, serviceable kind, yet she hesitated, and delayed showing those tokens while Ted was still in the land of the living—in other words, unmarried. If she could only write to tell Laurette that Stella was engaged! Before she left Melbourne the two had canvassed the whole affair in that exhaustive, unreserved fashion habitual to many women in talking over their own and other people's affairs.

'I consider Stella as good as engaged to Ted after all that has passed,' Laurette had said. And when Julia came home, it was with a fixed resolve to regard Ted as no longer among the quick; and she had even planned those overtures which would convince Mr. Timothy Haydon that, though a girl might decline to leave the parental roof over three years ago, it did not follow that she would always be in that negative mood. He would come home with them from church one Sunday, as he sometimes did, and a little accidental stroll in the garden together and a judicious leading would surely be enough. But, then, before this visit or stroll came off, she found that Stella Courtland and Dr. Langdale were 'as thick as two thieves,' as she expressed it in writing to Laurette. On getting this letter, Laurette had instantly written back asking Julia to be sure to let her know if anything happened. It was rather early days for anything to have 'happened' in Laurette's sense of the term; but, then, speedy wooings are not rare in Australia, especially when there is a separation in near prospect. Stella's visit was not to extend beyond the middle of September, while Dr. Langdale's original intention was to return to England in October. And then they saw so much of each other: they had so much to say, and looked grave, and laughed, and interested, and animated all in turn. What could such proceedings mean, but that they were fascinated by each other and falling in love?

And then, in the midst of her dubitations on the point, Mr. Timothy Haydon suddenly announced his intention of visiting England after shearing. It was well known to his friends that he had a tribe of unmarried elderly female relations in England—cousins of all degrees of nearness and remoteness. He would never return 'alive,' Julia was certain of that. If she was not prepared to resign him, to let him become the victim of a foreign brave of the female 'sect,' she must take speedy action. But what if, after the day on which that stroll should come off in the garden with a successful issue, she heard that the knell of Ted's hopes as far as Stella was concerned had been rung! It was a cruel position for a young woman whose fate lay in her own hands, as far, at any rate, as the second best match possible to her was concerned. It was like the story of the old woman who was driving her pigs to market. In her perplexity Julia resolved to play the part of the rope in that legend of the nursery. According to the light that was in her, she resolved on a little experiment of her own to bring matters to a crisis.

Two days before Mrs. Claude returned there had been a lawn-tennis party at Dr. Morrison's. Dr. Langdale was one of the players, and during an interval in which Miss Morton and he were looking on, the lady took the opportunity of speaking of Stella's play as a prelude to playing the part of the rope.

'Miss Courtland never strikes the ball except on the run. Now, which do you think is the better way to play a stroke, Dr. Langdale?'

'The way in which you are most successful, I should say,' answered Langdale, smiling.

'I would like awfully to learn how to put on twist when I give a service as Miss Courtland does. I wish she were to settle here when she marries; but her future home will be a long way off.'

'Yes?' said Dr. Langdale. But Julia could not detect any show of surprise. There was, perhaps, a slight, slow alteration of colour, and in a little while he added: 'I did not know that Miss Stella was to be married.'

'Oh, it is a very old story! She was engaged for a short time years ago to the gentleman and broke it off, and now it is on, or as good as on, again—at least, so her sister-in-law that is to be told me. Perhaps I should not have spoken. But'—with an arch smile—'I thought, as you are such good friends, that you knew.'

'Well, I hope the happy man deserves his good luck,' returned Langdale; and there the matter dropped.

In thinking over it afterwards, a panic seized Julia that she might have put a rachet in the wheels instead of giving them a spin. But no; she felt certain people could not be so intimate without 'talking over' things that concerned them. If Langdale was at all affected, he would not rest till he found out whether this was true. Such rumours often advanced affairs in a marvellous way; but since then eight days had come and gone, and there was no sign. Miss Morton used to lie awake at night thinking that after all she might fall between two stools. And now shearing would soon begin, and she was as undecided as ever about that stroll in the garden with Mr. Timothy Haydon.

So on this Sunday she resolved to glean all that she could, hoping for some light that would help her to come to a decision. After dinner she and Mrs. Claude went into the banksia-covered arbour at the far end of the garden, the very spot in which Julia had pictured herself gently leading her Adonis of fifty into the primrose path of dalliance. She recalled him as she had seen him that morning (his pew was not far from theirs in church), and her heart fell. His fiery fringe of hair was getting scantier, his eyes paler and more blinking, his wrinkles more obtrusive. And then she thought of Ted. The contrast between the two gave her a sense of faltering dismay. Then she thought of Stella as an interloper, whose unpardonable wilfulness overshadowed her own (Julia's) plans like a nightshade.

'Well, Nell, and how do you get on with Stella Courtland, on the whole?' she said, suddenly rousing herself out of the reverie in which the probable and possible husband formed a disconcerting foreground.

'Oh, charmingly! Who could help liking her?—so full of fun, and all kinds of unexpected fancies.'

'You seem to have rather a trick of standing round her at Lull, when she talks; but, for my own part, I like a girl with a more open disposition. Now, who would see her with Dr. Langdale without thinking they were lovers, or going to be?' said Julia, with much animation.

'Well, and supposing they were?' said Mrs. Claude, a little surprised at her sister's tone.

'Supposing they were! And she as good as engaged to Ted Ritchie!' retorted Julia.

She was determined to put her case bluntly, so as to extort her sister's opinion all the more quickly.

But instead of evoking any sharp denial, as she hoped to do, a sudden light seemed to fall on Mrs. Claude.

'Well, now, that explains what has begun to puzzle me,' she said slowly; and at these words poor Julia's heart fell.

'What has been puzzling you, Nell?'

'The sort of fast friendship there is between Stella and Dr. Langdale, without any approach to love-making.'

'Without any approach to love-making!' echoed Julia bitterly. 'Well, Nell, you must be a greenhorn to be taken in by such stuff. Why, you cannot see the two together without knowing at once they are playing at being friends; but it's about the shabbiest disguise I ever saw.'

'Oh, I know how you look at it, Julia,' said Mrs. Claude, with a quiet smile. 'You only see part of the play, and the other part you put together all endways.'

'Well, I see only part, but enough is as good as a feast, they say. Why, last Thursday when I was over there I saw them meeting at the passion-flower bridge, and it took them a solid hour to get from there to the house! And yet till Stella appeared you know the sort of deadly calm the Doctor always maintained to young ladies. Indeed, Mrs. Waring felt certain there was something behind it all—that he was privately married, or a woman-hater, or something.'

'Oh, we all know Mrs. Waring's talent for working out patterns for other people's lives,' said Mrs. Claude, with a superior little smile which Julia found very trying. 'You see,' she went on, with the combined experience of one recently married and travelled, 'people in the Bush think, as a rule, that if two people like Stella and Dr. Langdale have long interesting talks, it must somehow mean love-making. So it does in ninety-eight cases, but they are the ninety-ninth, and with them it doesn't. And when you see a little more of the world you'll find there are plenty more like them. Why, when we were at Geneva we met an American lady and her mother. I suppose I ought to name the mother first, but she was really as much in the background as an extra dress-basket. Well, the daughter was not young, and there was a countryman of hers, the Consul there, who had been her intimate friend for fourteen years. During all that time when they are apart they write long letters to each other every other week.'

'Good gracious! what a waste of time! Why in the world don't they marry?' cried Julia energetically.

'Well, you see, they only want just to be friends,' answered Mrs. Claude, with unconscious irony; 'and they had all sorts of things to talk about, only they were always very serious. But Stella and the Doctor have great fun very often.'

'Why, do they chaff each other much? Because, you know, that's a great sign sometimes. That's the way Dan Wylie and Milly Waring used to go on.'

'Mercy on us! do you suppose that Stella and Dr. Langdale go in for that sort of horse-play?' said Mrs. Claude, with a comic look of horror.

'Well, I wish to goodness you would give me some idea of what they do go in for. I might then get an opinion of my own. You mustn't think it's just idle curiosity,' said Julia, with a solemn expression. 'Any time I overhear them they laugh and smile at things that don't seem to me in the least funny. And Hector, too, who is the slowest coach I ever saw in my life, he seems quite lively and talkative with these two.'

'Well, you know, Hector and Dr. Langdale were great friends before ever Stella came.'

'What was that talk going on about novel-writing on Thursday evening?'

'Oh, there is a theory that each is writing a novel. Stella declares the Doctor is bent on making his book so agreeable that there are crowds of obliging fairies in attendance on his characters, picking crumpled rose-leaves out of their way, and so on. And he imagines that her people in the end resolve to sit still all their lives, as the only way in which they can avoid doing evil; and then when things go wrong they call Nature, and Life, and Providence to the bar of judgment, and decree that they ought to be hanged, so as to give the world a fresh start. The Doctor declares that reaping as we sow makes up two-thirds of the misfortunes of life. Then Stella asserts that life is so arranged that you sow tares when you mean to sow wheat, and that when you do sow honest grain an enemy comes in the night, who spoils the harvest.'

'Well, it's rather silly, don't you think, to go on so about far-off things? And then they seem to turn even people's misfortunes into a joke. They were actually smiling over Mr. Dene's compound fracture.

'Oh, Julia, how can you take up things in such a crooked way!' said Mrs. Claude warmly. 'They did nothing of the sort. Hector had been to see Mr. Dene, and said he was getting low-spirited through being confined to the house so long. And then Stella said, quite gravely at first—she often makes one believe she is in earnest when she is not—"I suppose in writing a novel fit to be read when one smoked a pipe after the labours of the day are over, an accident of this kind should be termed one of the agreeable amusements of old age—or would you ignore a compound fracture altogether?"'