The Unbidden Guest

By

Ernest William Hornung

 CHAPTER I.—THE GIRL FROM HOME.

Arabella was the first at the farm to become aware of Mr. Teesdale's return
from Melbourne. She was reading in the parlour, with her plump elbows
planted upon the faded green table-cloth, and an untidy head of light-coloured
hair between her hands; looking up from her book by chance, she saw through
the closed window her father and the buggy climbing the hill at the old mare's
own pace. Arabella went on reading until the buggy had drawn up within a
few feet of the verandah posts and a few more of the parlour window. Then
she sat in doubt, with her finger on the place; but before it appeared absolutely
necessary to jump up and run out, one of the men had come up to take charge
of the mare, and Arabella was enabled to remove her finger and read on.
The parlour was neither very large nor at all lofty, and the shut window and
fire-place closely covered by a green gauze screen, to keep the flies out, made
it disagreeably stuffy. There were two doors, but both of these were shut also,
though the one at the far end of the room, facing the hearth, nearly always
stood wide open. It led down a step into a very little room where the guns
were kept and old newspapers thrown, and where somebody was whistling
rather sweetly as the other door opened and Mr. Teesdale entered, buggy-whip
in hand.
He was a frail, tallish old gentleman, with a venerable forehead, a thin
white beard, very little hair to his pate, and clear brown eyes that shone kindly
upon all the world. He had on the old tall hat he always wore when driving
into Melbourne, and the yellow silk dust-coat which had served him for many
a red-hot summer, and was still not unpresentable. Arabella was racing to the
end of a paragraph when he entered, and her father had stolen forward and
kissed her untidy head before she looked up.
"Bad girl," said he, playfully, "to let your old father get home without ever
coming out to meet him!"
"I was trying to finish this chapter," said Arabella. She went on trying.
"I know, I know! I know you of old, my dear. Yet I can't talk, because I am
as bad as you are; only I should like to see you reading something better than
the Family Cherub." There were better things in the little room adjoining,
where behind the shooting lumber was some motley reading, on two long
sagging shelves; but that room was known as the gun-room, and half those
books were hidden away behind powder-canisters, cartridge-cases, and the
like, while all were deep in dust.
"You read it yourself, father," said Arabella as she turned over a leaf of her
Family Cherub.
"I read it myself. More shame for me! But then I've read all them books in
the little gun-room, and that's what I should like to see you reading now and
then. Now why have you got yon door shut, Arabella, and who's that whistling
in there?"
"It's our John William," Miss Teesdale said; and even as she spoke the door
in question was thrown open by a stalwart fellow in a Crimean shirt, with the
sleeves rolled up from arms as brown and hard-looking as mellow oak. He had
a breech-loader in one hand and a greasy rag in the other.
"Holloa, father!" cried he, boisterously.
"Well, John William, what are you doing?"
"Cleaning my gun. What have you been doing, that's more like it? What
took you trapesing into Melbourne the moment I got my back turned this
morning?"
"Why, hasn't your mother told you?"
"Haven't seen her since I came in."
"Well, but Arabella——"
"Arabella! I'm full up of Arabella," said John William contemptuously; but
the girl was still too deep in the Family Cherub to heed him. "There's no
getting a word out of Arabella when she's on the read; so what's it all about,
father?"
"I'll tell you; but you'd better shut yon window, John William, or I don't
know what your mother 'll say when she comes in and finds the place full o'
flies."
It was the gun-room window that broke the law of no fresh air, causing Mr.
Teesdale uneasiness until John William shut it with a grumble; for in this
homestead the mistress was law-maker, and indeed master, with man-servant
and maid-servant, husband and daughter, and a particularly headstrong son,
after her own heart, all under her thumb together.
"Now then, father, what was it took you into Melbourne all of a sudden
like that?"
"A letter by the English mail, from my old friend Mr. Oliver."
"Never heard tell of him," said John William, making spectacles of his
burnished bores, and looking through them into the sunlight. Already he had
lost interest.
Mr. Teesdale was also occupied, having taken from his pocket a very large
red cotton handkerchief, with which he was wiping alternately the dust from
his tall hat and the perspiration from the forehead whereon the hat had left a
fiery rim. Now, however, he nodded his bald head and clicked his lips, as one
who gives another up.
"Well, well! Never heard tell of him—you who've heard me tell of him
time out o' mind! Nay, come; why, you're called after him yourself! Ay, we
called you after John William Oliver because he was the best friend that ever
we had in old Yorkshire or anywhere else; the very best; and you pretend
you've never heard tell of him."
"What had he got to say for himself?" said Mr. Oliver's namesake, with a
final examination of the outside of his barrels.
"Plenty; he's sent one of his daughters out in the Parramatta, that got in
with the mail yesterday afternoon; and of course he had given her an
introduction to me."
"What's that?" exclaimed John William, looking up sharply, as he ran over
the words in his ear. "I say, father, we don't want her here," he added earnestly.
"Oh, did you find out where she was? Have you seen her? What is she
like?" cried Arabella, jumping up from the table and joining the others with a
face full of questions. She had that instant finished her chapter.
"I don't know what she's like; I didn't see her; I couldn't even find out
where she was, though I tried at half a dozen hotels and both coffee-palaces,"
said the farmer with a crestfallen air.
"All the better!" cried John William, grounding his gun with a bang. "We
don't want none of your stuck-up new chums or chumesses here, father."
"I don't know that; for my part, I should love to have a chance of talking to
an English young lady," Arabella said, with a backward glance at her Family
Cherub. "They're very rich, the Olivers," she added for her brother's benefit;
"that's their house in the gilt frame in the best parlour, the house with the
tower; and the group in the frame to match, that is the Olivers, isn't it, father?"
"It is, my dear; that's to say, it was, some sixteen years ago. We must get
yon group and see which one it is that has come out, and then I'll read you Mr.
Oliver's letter, John William. If only he'd written a mail or two before the child
started! However, if we've everything made snug for her to-night, I'll lay hands
on her to-morrow if she's in Melbourne; and then she shall come out here for a
month or two to start with, just to see how she likes it."
"How d'ye know she'll want to come out here at all?" asked John William.
"Don't you believe it, father; she wouldn't care for it a little bit."
"Not care for it? Not want to come out and make her home with her
parents' old friends? Then she's not her father's daughter," cried Mr. Teesdale
indignantly; "she's no child of our good old friends. Why, it was Mr. Oliver
who gave me the watch I——hush! Was that your mother calling?"
It was. "David! David! Have you got back, David?" the harsh voice came
crying through the lath-and-plaster walls.
Mr. Teesdale scuttled to the door. "Yes, my dear, I've just got in. No, I'm
not smoking. Where are you, then? In the spare room? All right, I'm coming,
I'm coming." And he was gone.
"Mother's putting the spare room to rights already," Arabella explained.
"I'm sorry to hear it; let's hope it won't be wanted."
"Why, John William? It would be such fun to have a young lady from
Home to stay with us!"
"I'm full up o' young ladies, and I'm just sick of the sound of Home. She'll
be a deal too grand for us, and there won't be much fun in that. What's the use
o' talking? If it was a son of this here old Oliver's it'd be a different thing; we'd
precious soon knock the nonsense out of him; I'd undertake to do it myself;
but a girl's different, and I jolly well hope she'll stop away. We don't want her
here, I tell you. We haven't even invited her. It's a piece of cheek, is the whole
thing!"
John William was in the parlour now, sitting on the horse-hair sofa, and
laying down the law with freckled fist and blusterous voice, as his habit was. It
was a good-humoured sort of bluster, however, and indeed John William
seldom opened his mouth without displaying his excellent downright nature in
one good light or another. He had inherited his mother's qualities along with
her sharp, decided features, which in the son were set off by a strong black
beard and bristling moustache. He managed the farm, the men, Arabella, and
his father; but all under Mrs. Teesdale, who managed him. Not that this
masterful young man was so young in years as you might well suppose;
neither John William nor Arabella was under thirty; but their lives had been so
simple and so hard-working that, going by their conversation merely, you
would have placed the two of them in their teens. For her part, too, Arabella
looked much younger than she was, with her wholesome, attractive face and
dreamy, inquisitive eyes; and as for the brother, he was but a boy with a beard,
still primed with rude health and strength, and still loaded with all the assorted
possibilities of budding manhood.
"I've taken down the group," said Mr. Teesdale, returning with a large
photograph in a gilt frame; "and here is the letter on the chimney-piece. We'll
have a look at them both again."
 On the chimney-piece also were the old man's spectacles, which he
proceeded to put on, and a tobacco jar and long clay pipe, at which he merely
looked lovingly; for Mrs. Teesdale would have no smoking in the house. His
own chair stood in the cosy corner between the window and the hearth; and he
now proceeded to pull it up to his own place at the head of the table as though
it were a meal-time, and that gilt-framed photograph the only dish. Certainly
he sat down to it with an appetite never felt during the years it had hung in the
unused, ornamental next room, without the least prospect of the Teesdales ever
more seeing any member of that group in the flesh. But now that such a
prospect was directly at hand, there was some sense in studying the old
photograph. It was of eight persons: the parents, a grandparent, and five
children. Three of the latter were little girls, in white stockings and hideous
boots with low heels and elastic sides; and to the youngest of these three, a
fair-haired child whose features, like those of the whole family, were screwed
up by a strong light and an exposure of the ancient length, Mr. Teesdale
pointed with his finger-nail.
"That's the one," said he. "She now is a young lady of five or six and
twenty."
"Don't think much of her looks," observed John William.
"Oh, you can't tell what she may be like from this," Arabella said, justly.
"She may be beautiful now; besides, look how the sun must have been in her
eyes, poor little thing! What's her name again, father?"
"Miriam, my dear."
"Miriam! I call it a jolly name, don't you, Jack?"
"It's a beast of a name," said John William.
"Stop while I read you a bit of the letter," cried the old man, smiling
indulgently. "I won't give you all of it, but just this little bit at the end. He's
been telling me that Miriam has her own ideas about things, has already seen
something of the world, and isn't perhaps quite like the girls I may remember
when we were both young men——"
"Didn't I tell you?" interrupted John William, banging the table with his
big fist. "She's stuck-up! We don't want her here."
"But just hark how he ends up. I want you both to listen to these few lines:
—'It may even be that she has formed habits and ways which were not the
habits and ways of young girls in our day, and that you may like some of these
no better than I do. Yet her heart, my dear Teesdale, is as pure and as innocent
as her mother's was before her, and I know that my old friend will let no mere
modern mannerisms prejudice him against my darling child, who is going so
far from us all. It has been a rather sudden arrangement, and though the
doctors ordered it, and Miriam can take care of herself as only the girls
nowadays can, still I would never have parted with her had I not known of one
tried friend to meet and welcome her at the other end. Keep her at your station,
my dear Teesdale, as long as you can, for an open-air life is, I am convinced,
what she wants above all things. If she should need money, an accident which
may always happen, let her have whatever she wants, advising me of the
amount immediately. I have told her to apply to you in such an extremity,
which, however, I regard as very unlikely to occur. I have also provided her
with a little note of introduction, with which she will find her way to you as
soon as possible after landing. And into your kind old hands, and those of your
warm-hearted wife, I cheerfully commend my girl, with the most affectionate
remembrances to you both, and only regretting that business will not allow me
to come out with her and see you both once more.' Then he finishes—calls
himself my affectionate friend, same as when we were boys together. And it's
two-and-thirty years since we said good-bye!" added Mr. Teesdale as he folded
up the letter and put it away.
He pushed his spectacles on to his forehead, for they were dim, and sat
gazing straight ahead, through the inner door that stood now wide open, and
out of the gun-room window. This overlooked a sunburnt decline, finishing,
perhaps a furlong from the house, at the crests of the river timber, that stood
out of it like a hedge, by reason of the very deep cut made by the Yarra, where
it formed the farm boundary on that side. And across the top of the window (to
one sitting in Mr. Teesdale's place) was stretched, like a faded mauve ribbon, a
strip of the distant Dandenong Ranges; and this and the timber were the
favourite haunts of the old man's eyes, for thither they strayed of their own
accord whenever his mind got absent elsewhere, as was continually
happening, and had happened now.
"It's a beautiful letter!" exclaimed Arabella warmly.
"I like it, too," John William admitted; "but I shan't like the girl. That kind
don't suit me at all; but I'll try to be civil to her on account of the old man, for
his letter is right enough."
Mr. Teesdale looked pleased, though he left his eyes where they were.
"Ay, ay, my dears, I thought you would like it. Ah, but all his letters are the
same! Two-and-thirty years, and never a year without at least three letters from
Mr. Oliver. He's a business man, and he always answers promptly. He's a rich
man now, my dears, but he doesn't forget the early friends, not he, though
they're at the other end of the earth, and as poor as he's rich."
"Yet he doesn't seem to know how we're situated, for all that," remarked
John William thoughtfully. "Look how he talks about our 'station,' and of your
advancing money to the girl, as though we were rolling in it like him! Have
you never told him our circumstances, father?"
At the question, Mr. Teesdale's eyes fell twenty miles, and rested guiltily
upon the old green tablecloth.
"I doubt a station and a farm convey much the same thing in the old
country," he answered crookedly.
"That you may bet they do!" cried the son, with a laugh; but he went on
delivering himself of the most discouraging prophecies touching the case in
point. The girl would come out with false ideas; would prove too fine by half
for plain people like themselves; and at the best was certain to expect much
more than they could possibly give her.
"Well, as to that," said the farmer, who thought himself lucky to have
escaped a scolding for never having told an old friend how poor he was—"as
to that, we can but give her the best we've got, with mebbe a little extra here
and there, such as we wouldn't have if we were by ourselves. The eggs 'll be
fresh, at any rate, and I think that she'll like her sheets, for your mother is
getting out them 'at we brought with us from Home in '51. There was just two
pairs, and she's had 'em laid by in lavender ever since. We can give her a good
cup o' tea, an' all; and you can take her out 'possum-shooting, John William,
and teach her how to ride. Yes, we'll make a regular bush-girl of her in a
month, and send her back to Yorkshire the picture of health; though as yet I'm
not very clear what's been the matter with her. But if she takes after her parents
ever so little she'll see that we're doing our best, and that'll be good enough for
any child of theirs."
From such a shabby waistcoat pocket Mr. Tees-dale took so handsome a
gold watch, it was like a ring on a beggar's finger; and he fondled it between
his worn hands, but without a word.
"Mr. Oliver gave you that watch, didn't he, father?" Arabella said,
watching him.
"He did, my dear," said the old man proudly. "He came and saw us off at
the Docks, and he gave me the watch on board, just as we were saying good-
bye; and he gave your mother a gold brooch which neither of you have ever
seen, for I've never known her wear it myself."
Arabella said she had seen it.
"Now his watch," continued Mr. Teesdale, "has hardly ever left my pocket
—save to go under my pillow—since he put it in my hands on July 3, 1851.
Here's the date and our initials inside the case; but you've seen them before.
Ay, but there are few who came out in '51—and stopped out—who have done
as poorly as me. The day after we dropped anchor in Hobson's Bay there
wasn't a living soul aboard our ship; captain, mates, passengers and crew, all
gone to the diggings. Every man Jack but me! It was just before you were
born, John William, and I wasn't going. It may have been a mistake, but the
Lord knows best. To be sure, we had our hard times when the diggers were
coming into Melbourne and shoeing their horses with gold, and filling buckets
with champagne, and standing by with a pannikin to make everybody drink
that passed; if you wouldn't, you'd got to take off your coat and show why. I
remember one of them offering me a hundred pounds for this very watch, and
precious hard up I was, but I wouldn't take it, not I, though I didn't refuse a
sovereign for telling him the time. Ay, sovereigns were the pennies of them
days; not that I fingered many; but I never got so poor as to part with Mr.
Oliver's watch, and you never must either, John William, when it's yours. Ay,
ay," chuckled Mr. Teesdale, as he snapped-to the case and replaced the watch
in his pocket, "and it's gone like a book for over thirty years, with nothing
worse than a cleaning the whole time."
"You must mind and tell that to Miriam, father," said Arabella, smiling.
"I must so. Ah, my dear, I shall have two daughters, not one, and you'll
have a sister while Miriam is here."
"That depends what Miriam is like," said John William, getting up from
the sofa with a Hugh and going back idly to the little room and his cleaned
gun.
"I know what she will be like," said Arabella, placing the group in front of
her on the table. "She will be delicate and fair, and rather small; and I shall
have to show her everything, and take tremendous care of her."
"I wonder if she'll have her mother's hazel eyes and gentle voice?" mused
the farmer aloud, with his eyes on their way back to the Dandenong Ranges.
"I should like her to take after her mother; she was one of the gentlest little
women that ever I knew, was Mrs. Oliver, and I never clapped eyes——"
The speaker suddenly turned his head; there had been a step in the
verandah, and some person had passed the window too quick for recognition.
"Who was that?" said Mr. Teesdale.
"I hardly saw," said Arabella, pushing back her chair. "It was a woman."
"And now she's knocking! Run and see who it is, my dear."
Arabella rose and ran. Then followed such an outcry in the passage that
Mr. Teesdale rose also. He was on his legs in time to see the door flung wide
open, and the excited eyes of Arabella reaching over the shoulder of the tall
young woman whom she was pushing into the room.
 "Here is Miriam," she cried. "Here's Miriam found her way out all by
herself!"

CHAPTER II.—A BAD BEGINNING.

At the sound of the voices outside, John William, for his part, had slipped
behind the gun-room door; but he had the presence of mind not to shut it quite,
and this enabled him to peer through the crack and take deliberate stock of the
fair visitant.
She was a well-built young woman, with a bold, free carriage and a very
daring smile. That was John William's first impression when he came to think
of it in words a little later. His eyes then fastened upon her hair. The poor
colour of her face and lips did not strike him at the time any more than the
smudges under the merry eyes. The common stamp of the regular features
never struck him at all, for of such matters old Mr. Teesdale himself was
hardly a judge; but the girl's hair took John William's fancy on the spot. It was
the most wonderful hair: red, and yet beautiful. There was plenty of it to be
seen, too, for the straw hat that hid the rest had a backward tilt to it, while an
exuberant fringe came down within an inch of the light eyebrows. John
William could have borne it lower still. He watched and listened with a smile
upon his own hairy visage, of which he was totally unaware.
"So this is my old friend's daughter!" the farmer had cried out.
"And you're Mr. Scarsdale, are you?" answered the girl, between fits of
intermittent, almost hysterical laughter.
"Eh? Yes, yes; I'm Mr. Teesdale, and this is my daughter Arabella. You are
to be sisters, you two."
The visitor turned to Arabella and gave her a sounding kiss upon the lips.
"And mayn't I have one too?" old Teesdale asked. "I'm that glad to see you,
my dear, and you know you're to look upon me like a father as long as you
stay in Australia. Thank you, Miriam. Now I feel as if you'd been here a week
already!"
Mr. Teesdale had received as prompt and as hearty a kiss as his daughter
before him.
"Mrs. Teesdale is busy, but she'll come directly," he went on to explain.
"Do you know what she's doing? She's getting your room ready, Miriam. We
knew that you had landed, and I've spent the whole day hunting for you in
town. Just to think that you should have come out by yourself after all! But our
John William was here a minute ago. John William, what are you doing?"
"Cleaning my gun," said the young man, coming from behind his door,
greasy rag in hand.
"Nay, come! You finished that job long ago. Come and shake hands with
Miriam. Look, here she is, safe and sound, and come out all by herself!"
"I'm very glad to see you," said the son of the house, advancing, dirty
palms foremost, "but I'm sorry I can't shake hands!"
"Then I'd better kiss you too!"
She had taken a swinging step forward, and the red fringe was within a
foot of his startled face, when she tossed back her head with a hearty laugh.
"No, I think I won't. You're too old and you're not old enough—see?"
"John William 'll be three-and-thirty come January," said Mr. Teesdale
gratuitously.
"Yes? That's ten years older than me," answered the visitor with equal
candour. "Exactly ten!"
"Nay, come—not exactly ten," the old gentleman said, with some gravity,
for he was a great stickler for the literal truth; "only seven or eight, I
understood from your father?"
The visitor coloured, then pouted, and then burst out laughing as she
exclaimed, "You oughtn't to be so particular about ladies' ages! Surely two or
three years is near enough, isn't it? I'm ashamed of you, Mr. Teesdale; I really
am!" And David received such a glance that he became exceedingly ashamed
of himself; but the smile that followed it warmed his old heart through and
through, and reminded him, he thought, of Miriam's mother.
Meantime, the younger Teesdale remained rooted to the spot where he had
been very nearly kissed. He was still sufficiently abashed, but perhaps on that
very account a plain speech came from him too.
"You're not like what I expected. No, I'm bothered if you are!"
"Much worse?" asked the girl, with a scared look.
"No, much better. Ten thousand times better!" cried the young man. Then
his shyness overtook him, and, though he joined in the general laughter, he
ventured no further remarks. As to the laughter, the visitor's was the most
infectious ever heard in the weather-board farmhouse. Arabella shook within
the comfortable covering with which nature had upholstered her, and old
David had to apply the large red handkerchief to his furrowed cheeks before
he could give her the message to Mrs. Teesdale, for which there had not been a
moment to spare out of the crowded minute or two which had elapsed since
the visitor's unforeseen arrival.
"Go, my dear," he said now, "and tell your mother that Miriam is here.
That's it. Mrs. T. will be with us directly, Miriam. Ah, I thought this
photograph'd catch your eye sooner or later. You'll have seen it once or twice
before, eh? Just once or twice, I'm thinking." The group still lay on the table at
Mr. Teesdale's end.
"Who are they?" asked the visitor, very carelessly; indeed, she had but
given the photograph a glance, and that from a distance.
"Who? Why, yourselves; your own family. All the lot of you when you
were little," cried David, snatching up the picture and handing it across. "We
were just looking at it when you came, Miriam; and I made you out to be this
one, look—this poor little thing with the sun in her eyes."
The old man was pointing with his finger, the girl examining closely. Their
heads were together. Suddenly she raised hers, looked him in the eyes, and
burst out laughing.
"How clever you are!" she said. "I'm not a bit like that now, now am I?"
She made him look well at her before answering. And in all his after
knowledge of it, he never again saw quite so bold and débonnaire an
expression upon that cool face framed in so much hot hair. But from a
mistaken sense of politeness, Mr. Teesdale made a disingenuous answer after
all, and the subject of conversation veered from the girl who had come out to
Australia to those she had left behind her in the old country.
That conversation would recur to Mr. Teesdale in after days. It contained
surprises for him at the time. Later, he ceased to wonder at what he had heard.
Indeed, there was nothing wonderful in his having nourished quite a number
of misconceptions concerning a family of whom he had set eyes on no
member for upwards of thirty years. It was those misconceptions which the
red-haired member of that family now removed. They were all very natural in
the circumstances. And yet, to give an instance, Mr. Teesdale was
momentarily startled to ascertain that Mrs. Oliver had never been so well in
her life as when her daughter sailed. He had understood from Mr. Oliver that
his wife was in a very serious state with diabetes. When he now said so, the
innocent remark made Miss Oliver to blush and bite her lips. Then she
explained. Her mother had been threatened with the disease in question, but
that was all. The real fact was, her father was morbidly anxious about her
mother, and to such an extent that it appeared the anxiety amounted to mania.
She put it in her own way.
 "Pa's mad on ma," she said. "You can't believe a word he says about her."
Mr. Teesdale found this difficult to believe of his old friend, who seemed
to him to write so sensibly about the matter. It made him look out of the gun-
room window. Then he recollected that the girl herself lacked health, for
which cause she had come abroad.
"And what was the matter with you, Miriam," said he, "for your father only
says that the doctors recommended the voyage?"
"Oh, that's all he said, was it?"
"Yes, that's all."
"And you want to know what was the matter with me, do you?"
"No, I was only wondering. It's no business of mine."
"Oh, but I'll tell you. Bless your life, I'm not ashamed of it. It was late
nights—it was late nights that was the matter with me."
"Nay, come," cried the farmer; yet, as he peered through his spectacles into
the bright eyes sheltered by the fiery fringe, he surmised a deep-lying
heaviness in the brain behind them; and he noticed now for the first time how
pale a face they were set in, and how gray the marks were underneath them.
"The voyage hasn't done you much good, either," he said. "Why, you aren't
even sunburnt."
"No? Well, you see, I'm such a bad sailor. I spent all my time in the cabin,
that's how it was."
"Yet the Argus says you had such a good voyage?"
"Yes? I expect they always say that. It was a beast of a voyage, if you ask
me, and quite as bad as late nights for you, though not nearly so nice."
"Ah, well, we'll soon set you up, my dear. This is the place to make a good
job of you, if ever there was one. But where have you been staying since you
landed, Miriam? It's upwards of twenty-four hours now."
The guest smiled.
"Ah, that's tellings. With some people who came out with me—some
swells that I knew in the West End, if you particularly want to know; not that
I'm much nuts on 'em, either."
"Don't you be inquisitive, father," broke in John William from the sofa. It
was his first remark since he had sat down.
"Well, perhaps I mustn't bother you with any more questions now," said
Mr. Teesdale to the girl; "but I shall have a hundred to ask you later on. To
think that you're Mr. Oliver's daughter after all! Ay, and I see a look of your
mother and all now and then. They did well to send you out to us, and get you
right away from them late hours and that nasty society—though here comes
one that'll want you to tell her all about that by-and-by."
The person in question was Arabella, who had just re-entered.
"Society?" said she. "My word, yes, I shall want you to tell me all about
society, Miriam."
"Do you hear that, Miriam?" said Mr. Teesdale after some moments. She
had taken no notice.
"What's that? Oh yes, I heard; but I shan't tell anybody anything more
unless you all stop calling me Miriam."
This surprised them; it had the air of a sudden thought as suddenly spoken.
"But Miriam's your name," said Arabella, laughing.
"Your father has never spoken of you as anything else," remarked Mr.
Teesdale.
"All the same, I'm not used to being called by it," replied their visitor, who
for the first time was exhibiting signs of confusion. "I like people to call me
what I'm accustomed to being called. You may say it's a pet name, but it's what
I'm used to, and I like it best."
"What is, missy?" said old Teesdale kindly; for the girl was staring
absently at the opposite wall.
"Tell us, and we'll call you nothing else," Arabella promised.
The girl suddenly swept her eyes from the wall to Mr. Teesdale's inquiring
face. "You said it just now," she told him, with a nod and her brightest smile.
"You said it without knowing when you called me 'Missy.' That's what they
always call me at home—Missy or the Miss. You pays your money and you
takes your choice."
"Then I choose Missy," said Arabella. "And now, father, I came with a
message from my mother; she wants you to take Missy out into the verandah
while we get the tea ready. She wasn't tidy enough to come and see you at
once, Missy, but she sends you her love to go on with, and she hopes that
you'll excuse her."
"Of course she will," answered Mr. Teesdale for the girl; "but will you
excuse me, Missy, if I bring my pipe out with me? I'm just wearying for a
smoke."
"Excuse you?" cried Missy, taking the old man's arm as she accompanied
him to the door. "Why, bless your life, I love a smoke myself."
John William had jumped up to follow them; had hesitated; and was left
behind.
"There!" said Arabella, turning a shocked face upon him the instant they
were quite alone.
"She was joking," said John William.
"I don't think it."
"Then you must be a fool, Arabella. Of course she was only in fun."
"But she said so many queer things; and oh, John William, she seems to
me so queer altogether!"
"Well, what the deuce did you expect?" cried the other in a temper. "Didn't
her own father say that she was something out of the common? What do you
know about it, anyway? What do you know about 'modern mannerisms'?
Didn't her own father let on that she had some? Even if she did smoke, I
shouldn't be surprised or think anything of it; depend upon it they smoke in
society, whether they do or they don't in your rotten Family Cherub. But she
was only joking when she said that; and I never saw the like of you, Arabella,
not to know a joke when you hear one." And John William stamped away to
his room; to reappear in a white shirt and his drab tweed suit, exactly as
though he had been going into Melbourne for the day.
It was Mrs. Teesdale, perhaps, who put this measure into her son's head;
for, as he quitted the parlour, she pushed past him to enter it, in the act of
fastening the final buttons of her gray-stuff chapel-going bodice. "Now, then,
Arabella," she cried sharply, "let blind down and get them things off table."
And on to it, as she spoke, Mrs. Teesdale flung a clean white folded table-
cloth which she had carried between elbow and ribs while busy buttoning her
dress. As for Arabella, she obeyed each order instantly, displaying an amount
of bustling activity which only showed itself on occasions when her mother
was particularly hot and irritable; the present was one.
Mrs. Teesdale was a tall, strong woman who at sixty struck one first of all
with her strength, activity, and hard, solid pluck. Her courage and her hardness
too were written in every wrinkle of a bloodless, weather-beaten face that must
have been sharp and pointed even in girlhood; and those same dominant
qualities shone continually in a pair of eyes like cold steel—the eyes of a
woman who had never given in. The woman had not her husband's heart full
of sympathy and affection for all but the very worst who came his way. She
had neither his moderately good education, nor his immoderately ready and
helping hand even for the worst. Least of all had she his simple but adequate
sense of humour; of this quality and all its illuminating satellites Mrs. Teesdale
was totally devoid. Yet, but for his wife, old David would probably have found
himself facing his latter end in one or other of the Benevolent Asylums of that
Colony; whereas with the wife's character inside the husband's skin, it is not
improbable that the name of David Teesdale would have been known and
honoured in the land where his days had been long indeed, but sadly
unprofitable.
Arabella, then, who had inherited some of David's weak points, just as
John William possessed his mother's strong ones, could work with the best of
them when she liked and Mrs. Teesdale drove. In ten minutes the tea was
ready; and it was a more elaborate tea than usual, for there was quince jam as
well as honey, and, by great good luck, cold boiled ham in addition to hot
boiled eggs. Last of all, John William, when he was ready, picked a posy of
geraniums from the bed outside the gun-room outer door (which was invisible
from the verandah, where David and the visitor could be heard chatting), and
placed them in the centre of the clean table-cloth. Then Mrs. Teesdale drew up
the blind; and a nice sight met their eyes.
Mr. Teesdale was discovered in earnest expostulation with the girl from
England, who was smoking his pipe. She had jumped on to the wooden
armchair upon which, a moment ago, she had no doubt been seated; now she
was dancing upon it, slowly and rhythmically, from one foot to the other, and
while holding the long clay well above the old man's reach, she kept puffing at
it with such immense energy that the smoke hung in a cloud about her rakish
fringe and wicked smile, under the verandah slates. A smile flickered also
across the entreating face of David Teesdale; and it was this his unpardonable
show of taking the outrage in good part, that made away with the wife's
modicum of self-control. Doubling a hard-working fist, she was on the point
of knocking at the window with all the might that it would bear, when her
wrist was held and the blind let down. And it was John William who faced her
indignation with the firm front which she herself had given him.
"I am very sorry, mother," said he quietly, "but you are not going to make a
scene."
Such was the power of Mrs. Teesdale in her own home, she could scarcely
credit her hearing. "Not going to?" she cried, for the words had been tuned
neither to question nor entreaty, but a command. "Let go my hands this
moment, sir!"
"Then don't knock," said John William, complying; and there was never a
knock; but the woman was blazing.
"How dare you?" she said; and indeed, man and boy, he had never dared so
much before.
 "You were going to make a scene," said he, as kindly as ever; "and though
we didn't invite her, she is our guest——"
"You may be ashamed of yourself! I don't care who she is; she shan't
smoke here."
"She is also the daughter of your oldest friends; and hasn't her own father
written to say she has ways and habits which the girls hadn't when you were
one? Not that smoking's a habit of hers: not likely. I'll bet she's only done this
for a lark. And you're to say nothing more about it, mother, do you see?"
"Draw up the blind," said Mrs. Teesdale, speaking to her son as she had
spoken to him all his life, but, for the first time, without confidence. "Draw up
the blind, and disobey me at your peril."
"Then promise to say nothing about it to the girl."
They eyed each other for a minute. In the end the mother said: "To the girl?
No, of course I won't say anything to her—unless it happens again." It was not
even happening when the blind was drawn up, and it never did happen again.
But Mrs. Teesdale had given in, for once in her life, and to one of her own
children. Moreover, there was an alien in the case, who was also a girl; and
this was the beginning between these three.

CHAPTER III.—AU REVOIR.

It was not a very good beginning, and the first to feel that was John
William himself. He felt it at tea. During the meal his mouth never opened,
except on business; but his eyes made up for it.
He saw everything. He saw that his mother and Missy would never get on;
he knew it the moment they kissed. There was no sounding smack that time.
The visitor, for her part, seemed anxious to show that even she could be shy if
she tried; and as for Mrs. Teesdale and her warm greeting, it was very badly
done. The tone was peevish, and her son, for one, could hear between the
words. "You're our old friends' child," he heard her saying in her heart, "but I
don't think I shall like you; for you've come without letting me know, you've
smoked, and you've set my own son against me—already." He was half sorry
that he had checked, what is as necessary to some as the breath they draw, a
little plain speaking at the outset. But sooner or later, about one thing or
another, this was bound to come; and come it did.
"I can't think, Miriam," said Mrs. Teesdale, "how you came by that red hair
o' yours! Your father's was very near black, and your mother's a light brown
wi' a streak o' gold in it; but there wasn't a red hair in either o' their heads that I
can remember."
At this speech John William bit off an oath under his beard, while David
looked miserably at his wife, and Arabella at their visitor, who first turned as
red as her hair, and then burst into a fit of her merriest laughter.
"Well, I can't help it, can I?" cried she, with a good-nature that won two
hearts, at any rate. "I didn't choose my hair; it grew its own colour—all I've
got to do is to keep it on!"
"Yes, but it's that red!" exclaimed Mrs. Teesdale stolidly, while John
William chuckled and looked less savage.
"Ah, you could light your old pipe at it," said Missy to the farmer, making
the chuckler laugh outright.
Not so Mr. Teesdale. "My dear," he said to his wife; "my dear!"
"Well, but I could understand it, David, if her parents' hairs had any red in
'em. In the only photograph we have of you, Miriam, which is that group there
taken when you were all little, you look to have your mother's fair hair. I can't
make it out."
"No?" said Missy, sweetly. "Then you didn't know that red always comes
out light in a photograph?"
"Oh, I know nothing at all about that," said Mrs. Teesdale, with the proper
disregard for a lost point. "Then have the others all got red hair too?"
"N—no, I'm the only one."
"Well, that's a good thing, Miriam, I'm sure it is!"
"Nay, come, my dear, that'll do," whispered David; while John William
said loudly, to change the subject, "You're not to call her Miriam, mother."
"And why not, I wonder?"
"Because she's not used to it. She says they call her Missy at home; and we
want to make her at home here, surely to goodness!"
Missy had smiled gratefully on John William and nodded confirmation of
his statement to Mrs. Teesdale, who, however, shook her head.
"Ay, but I don't care for nicknames at all," said she, without the shadow of
a smile; "I never did and I never shall, John William. So, Miriam, you'll have
to put up with your proper name from me, for I'm too old to change. And I'm
sure it's not an ugly one," added the dour woman, less harshly. "Is your cup
off, Miriam?" she added to that; she did not mean to be quite as she was.
 It was at this point, however, that the visitor asked Mr. Teesdale the time,
and that Mr. Teesdale, with a sudden eloquence in his kind old eyes, showed
her the watch which Mr. Oliver had given him; speaking most touchingly of
her father's goodness, and kindness, and generosity, and of their lifelong
friendship. Thus the long hand marked some minutes while the watch was still
out before it appeared why Missy wanted to know the time. She then declared
she must get back to Melbourne before dark, a statement which provoked
some brisk opposition, notably on the part of Mr. Teesdale. But the girl
showed commendable firmness. She would go back as she had come, by the
six o'clock 'bus from the township. None of them, however, would hear of the
'bus, and John William waited until a compromise had been effected by her
giving way on this point; then he went out to put-to.
This proved a business. The old mare had already made one journey into
Melbourne and back; and that was some nine miles each way. There was
another buggy-horse, but it had to be run up from the paddock. Thus twenty
minutes elapsed before John William led horse and trap round to the front of
the house. He found the party he had left mildly arguing round the tea-table,
now assembled on the grass below the red-brick verandah. They were arguing
still, it seemed, and not quite so mildly. Missy was buttoning a yellow glove,
the worse for wear, and she was standing like a rock, with her mouth shut
tight. Mr. Teesdale had on his tall hat and his dust-coat, and the whip was once
more in his hand; at the sight of him his son's heel went an inch into the
ground.
"Only fancy!" cried the old man in explanation. "She says she's not coming
back to us any more. She doesn't want to come out and stay with us!"
Arabella echoed the "Only fancy!" while Mrs. Teesdale thought of the old
folks who had been young when she was, and said decisively, "But she'll have
to."
John William said nothing at all; but it was to him the visitor now looked
appealingly.
"It isn't that I shouldn't like it—that isn't it at all—it's that you wouldn't like
me! Oh, you don't know what I am. You don't, I tell you straight. I'm not fit to
come and stay here—I should put you all about so—there's no saying what I
shouldn't do. You can't think how glad I am to have seen you all. It's a jolly old
place, and I shall be able to tell 'em all at home just what it's like. But you'd far
better let me rest where I am—you—you—you really had."
She had given way, not to tears, indeed, but to the slightly hysterical
laughter which had characterised her entry into the parlour when John William
was looking through the crack. Now she once more made her laughter loud,
and it seemed particularly inconsequent. Yet here was a sign of irresolution
which old David, as the wisest of the Teesdales, was the first to recognise.
Moreover, her eyes were flying from the weather-board farmhouse to the river
timber down the hill, from the soft cool grass to the peaceful sky, and from
hay-stack to hen-yard, as though the whole simple scene were a temptation to
her; and David saw this also.
"Nonsense," said he firmly; and to the others, "She'll come back and stay
with us till she's tired of us—we'll never be tired of you, Missy. Ay, of course
she will. You leave her to me, Mrs. T."
"Then," said Missy, snatching her eyes from their last fascination, a wattle-
bush in bloom, "will you take all the blame if I turn out a bad egg?"
"A what?" said Mrs. Teesdale.
"Of course we will," cried her husband, turning a deaf ear to John William,
who was trying to speak to him.
"You promise, all of you!"
"Of course we do," answered the farmer again; but he had not answered
John William.
"Then I'll come, and your blood be on your own heads."
For a moment she stood smiling at them all in turn; and not a soul of them
saw her next going without thinking of this one. The low sun struck full upon
the heavy red fringe, and on the pale face and the devil-may-care smile which
it over-hung just then. At the back of that smile there was a something which
seemed to be coming up swiftly like a squall at sea; but only for one moment;
the next, she had kissed the women, shaken hands with the young man,
mounted into the buggy beside Mr. Teesdale, and the two of them were driving
slowly down the slope.
"I think, John William," said his mother, "that you might have driven in
this time, instead o' letting your father go twice."
"Didn't I want to?" replied John William, in a bellow which made Missy
turn her head at thirty yards. "He was bent on going. He's the most pig-headed
old man in the Colony. He wouldn't even answer me when I spoke to him
about it just now."
He turned on his heel, and mother and daughter were at last alone, and free
to criticise.
"For a young lady fresh from England," began the former, "I must say I
thought it was a shabby dress—didn't you?"
"Shabby isn't the word," said Arabella; "if you ask me, I call her whole
style flashy—as flashy as it can stick."
 CHAPTER IV.—A MATTER OF TWENTY POUNDS.

This is jolly!" exclaimed Missy, settling herself comfortably at the old

man's side as she handed him back the reins. They had just jogged out of the
lowest paddock, and Mr. Teesdale had been down to remove the slip-rails and
to replace them after Missy had driven through.
"Very nicely done," the farmer said, in his playful, kindly fashion. "I see
you've handled the ribbons before."
"Never in my life!"
"Indeed? I should have thought that with all them horses and carriages
every one of you would have learnt to ride and drive."
"Yes, you would think so," Missy said, after a pause; "but in my case you'd
think wrong. I can't bear horses, so I tell you straight. One flew at me when I
was a little girl, and I've never gone near 'em since."
"Flew at you!" exclaimed Mr. Teesdale. "Nay, come!"
"Well, you know what I mean. I'd show you the bite——"
"Oh, it bit you? Now I see, now I see."
"You saw all along!"
"No, it was such a funny way of putting it."
"You knew what I meant," persisted Missy. "If you're going to make game
of me, I'll get down and walk. Shall we be back in Melbourne by seven?"
Mr. Teesdale drew out his watch with a proud smile and a tender hand. He
loved consulting it before anybody, but Missy's presence gave the act a special
charm. He shook his head, however, in answer to her question.
"We'll not do it," said he; "it's ten past six already."
"Then how long is it going to take us?"
"Well, not much under the hour; you see——"
A groan at his side made Mr. Teesdale look quickly round; and there was
trouble under the heavy fringe.
"I must be there soon after seven!" cried the girl petulantly.
"Ay, but where, Missy? I'll do my best," said David, snatching up the whip,
"if you'll tell me where it is you want to be."
 "It's the Bijou Theatre—I'm supposed to be there by seven—to meet the
people I'm staying with, you know."
David had begun to use the whip vigorously, but now he hesitated and
looked pained. "I am sorry to hear it's a theatre you want to get to," said he
gravely.
"Why, do you think them such sinks of iniquity—is that it?" asked the girl,
laughing.
"I never was in a theatre in my life, Missy; I don't approve of them, my
dear."
"No more do I—no more do I! But when you're staying with people you
can't always be your own boss, now can you?"
"You could with us, Missy."
"Well, that's bully; but I can't with these folks. They're regular terrors for
the theatre, the folks I'm staying with now, and I don't know what they'll say if
I keep 'em waiting long. Think you can do it?"
"Not by seven; but I think we might get there between five and ten minutes
past."
"Thank God!"
Mr. Teesdale wrinkled his forehead, but said nothing. Evidently it was of
the first importance that Missy should not keep her friends waiting. Of these
people, however, she had already spoken so lightly that David was pleased to
fancy her as not caring very much about them. He was pleased, not only
because they took her to the theatre, but because he wanted no rival Australian
friends for his old friend's child; the farm, if possible, must be her only home
so long as she remained in the Colony. When, therefore, the girl herself
confirmed his hopes the very next time she opened her mouth, the old man
beamed with satisfaction.
"These folks I'm staying with," said Missy—"I'm not what you call dead
nuts on 'em, as I said before."
"I'm glad to hear it," chuckled David, "because we want you all to
ourselves, my dear."
"So you think! Some day you'll be sorry you spoke."
"Nonsense, child. What makes you talk such rubbish? You've got to come
and make your home with us until you're tired of us, as I've told you already.
Where is it they live, these friends of yours?"
"Where do they live?" repeated Missy. "Oh, in Kew."
 "Ah—Kew."
The name was spoken in a queer, noticeable tone, as of philosophic
reflection. Then the farmer smiled and went on driving in silence; they were
progressing at a good speed now. But Missy had looked up anxiously.
"What do you know about Kew?" said she.
"Not much," replied David, with a laugh; "only once upon a time I had a
chance of buying it—and had the money too!"
"You had the money to buy Kew?"
"Yes, I had it. There was a man who took me on to a hill and showed me a
hollow full of scrub and offered to get me the refusal of it for an old song. I
had the money and all, as it happened, but I wasn't going to throw it away. The
place looked a howling wilderness; but it is now the suburb of Kew."
"Think of that. Aren't you sorry you didn't buy it?"
"Oh, it makes no difference."
"But you'd be so rich if you had!"
"I should be a millionaire twice over," said the farmer, complacently, as he
removed his ruin of a top-hat to let in the breeze upon his venerable pate.
Missy sat aghast at him.
"It makes me sick to think of it," she exclaimed. "I don't know what I
couldn't do to you! If I'd been you I'd have cut my throat years ago. To think of
the high old time you could have had!"
"I never had that much desire for a high old time," said Mr. Teesdale with
gentle exaltation.
"Haven't I, then, that's all!" cried his companion in considerable
excitement. "It makes a poor girl feel bad to hear you go on like that."
"But you're not a poor girl."
Missy was silenced.
"Yes, I am," she said at last, with an air of resolution. It was not, however,
until they were the better part of a mile nearer Melbourne.
"You are what?"
"A poor girl."
"Nonsense, my dear. I wonder what your father would say if he heard you
talk like that."
"He's got nothing to do with it."
 "Not when he's worth thousands, Missy?"
"Not when he's thousands of miles away, Mr. Teesdale."
Mr. Teesdale raised his wrinkled forehead and drove on. A look of mingled
anxiety and pain aged him years in a minute. Soon the country roads were left
behind, and the houses began closing up on either side of a very long and
broad high road. It was ten minutes to seven by Mr. Teesdale's watch when he
looked at it again. It was time for him to say the difficult thing which had
occurred to him two or three miles back, and he said it in the gentlest tones
imaginable from an old man of nearly seventy.
"Missy, my dear, is it possible" (so he put it) "that you have run short of the
needful?"
"It's a fact," said Missy light-heartedly.
"But how, my dear, have you managed to do that?"
"How? Let's see. I gave a lot away—to a woman in the steerage—whose
husband went and died at sea. He died of dropsy. I nursed him, I did. Rather! I
helped lay him out when he was dead. But don't go telling anybody—please."
Mr. Teesdale had shuddered uncontrollably; now, however, he shifted the
reins to his right hand in order to pat Missy with his left.
"You're a noble girl. You are that! Yet it's only what I should have expected
of their child. I might ha' known you'd be a noble girl."
"But you won't tell anybody?"
"Not if you'd rather I didn't. That proves your nobility! About how much
would you like, my dear, to go on with?"
"Oh, twenty pounds."
Mr. Teesdale drew the breeze in through the broken ranks of his teeth.
"Wouldn't—wouldn't ten do, my dear?"
"Ten? Let's think. No, I don't think I could do with a penny less than
twenty. You see, a wave came into the cabin and spoilt all my things. I want
everything new."
"But I understood you had such a good voyage, Missy?"
"Not from me you didn't! Besides, it was my own fault: I gone and left the
window open, and in came a sea. Didn't the captain kick up a shine! But I told
him it was worse for me than for him; and look at the old duds I've got to go
about in all because! Why, I look quite common—I know I do. No; I must
have new before I come out to stay at the farm."
 "I'm sure our Arabella dresses simple," the farmer was beginning; but
Missy cut him short, and there was a spot of anger on each of her pale cheeks
as she broke out:
"But this ain't simple—it's common! I had to borrow the most of it. All my
things were spoilt. I can't get a new rig-out for less than twenty pounds, and
without everything new——"
"Nay, come!" cried old David, in some trouble. "Of course I'll let you have
anything you want—I have your father's instructions to do so. But—but there
are difficulties. It's difficult at this moment. You see the banks are closed, and
—and—-"
"Oh, don't you be in any hurry. Send it when you can; then I'll get the
things and come out afterwards. Why, here we are at Lonsdale Street!"
"But I want you to come out soon. How long would it take you to get
everything?"
"To-day's Thursday. If I had it to-morrow I could come out on Monday."
"Then you shall have it to-morrow," said David, closing his lips firmly.
"Though the banks are closed, there's the man we send our milk to, and he
owes me a lump more than twenty pound. I'll go to him now and get the
twenty from him, or I'll know the reason why! Yes, and I'll post it to you
before I go back home at all! What address must I send it to, Missy?"
"What address? Oh, to the General Post Office. I don't want the folks I am
staying with to know. They offered to lend me, and I wouldn't. Will you stop,
please?"
"Quite right, my dear, quite right. I was the one to come to. You'll find it at
the——"
"Do you mind stopping?"
"Why, we're not there yet. We're not even in Bourke Street."
"No, but please stop here."
"Very well. Here we are, then, and it's only six past. But why not drive
right on to the theatre—that's what I want to know?"
Missy hesitated, and hesitated, until she saw the old man peering into her
face through the darkness that seemed to have fallen during the last five
minutes. Then she dropped her eyes. They had pulled up alongside the deep-
cut channel between road-metal and curb-stone, whereby you shall remember
the streets of Melbourne. Nobody appeared to be taking any notice of them.
"I see," said David very gently. "And I don't wonder at it. No, Missy, it's
not at all the sort of turn-out for your friends to see you in. Jump down, my
dear, and I'll just drive alongside to see that nothing happens you. But I won't
seem to know you, Missy—I won't seem to know you!"
Lower and lower, as the old man spoke, the girl had been hanging her
head; until now he could see nothing of her face on account of her fringe;
when suddenly she raised it and kissed his cheek. She was out of the buggy
next moment.
She walked at a great rate, but David kept up with her by trotting his horse,
and they exchanged signals the whole way. Close to the theatre she beckoned
to him to pull up again. He did so, and she came to the wheel with one of her
queer, inscrutable smiles.
"How do you know," said she, "that I'm Miriam Oliver at all?"
The rays from a gas-lamp cut between their faces as she looked him full in
the eyes.
"Why, of course you are!"
"But how do you know?"
"Nay, come, what a question! What makes you ask it, Missy?"
"Because I've given you no proof. I brought an introduction with me and I
went and forgot to give it to you. However, here it is, so you may as well put it
in your pipe and smoke it."
She took some letters out of her pocket as she spoke, and shifted the top
one to the bottom until she came to an envelope that had never been through
the post. This she handed up to David, who recognised his old friend's writing,
which indeed had caught his eye on most of the other envelopes also. And
when she had put these back in her pocket she held out her dirty-gloved hand.
"So long," she said. "You won't know me when I turn up on Monday."
"Stop!" cried David. "You must let me know when to send the buggy for
you, and where to. It'll never do to have you coming out in the 'bus again."
"Right you are. I'll let you know. So long again—and see here. I think
you're the sweetest and trustingest old man in the world!"
She was far ahead, this time, before the buggy was under way again.
"Naturally," chuckled David, following her hair through the crowd. "I
should hope so, indeed, when it's a child of John William Oliver, and one that
you can love for her own sake an' all! But what made her look so sorry when
she gave me the kiss? And what's this? Nay, come, I must have made a
mistake!"
 He had flattered himself that his eyes never left the portals where they had
lost sight of the red hair, and when he got up to it what should it be but the
stage door? The words were painted over it as plain as that. The mistake might
be Missy's; but a little waiting by the curb convinced Mr. Teesdale that it was
his own; for Missy never came back, as he argued she must have done if she
really had gone in at the stage door.

CHAPTER V.—A WATCH AND A PIPE.

Mr. Teesdale drove on to the inn at which he was in the habit of putting up
when in town with the buggy. His connection with the house was very
characteristic. Many years before the landlord had served him in a menial
capacity, but for nearly as many that worthy had been infinitely more
prosperous than poor David, who, indeed, had never prospered at all. They
were good friends, however, for the farmer had a soul too serene for envy, and
a heart too simple to be over-sensitive concerning his own treatment at the
hands of others. Thus he never resented his old hand's way with him, which
would have cut envy, vanity, or touchiness, to the quick. He came to this inn
for the sake of old acquaintance; it never occurred to him to go elsewhere; nor
had he ever been short or sharp with his landlord before this evening, when,
instead of answering questions and explaining what had brought him into
Melbourne twice in one day, Mr. Teesdale flung the reins to the ostler, and
himself out of the yard, with the rather forbidding reply that he was there on
business. He was, indeed; though the business was the birth of the last half-
hour.
It led him first to a little bare office overlooking a yard where many milk-
carts stood at ease with their shafts resting upon the ground; and the other
party to it was a man for whom Mr. Teesdale was no match.
"I must have twenty pounds," said David, beginning firmly.
"When?" replied the other coolly.
"Now. I shan't go home without it."
"I am very sorry, Mr. Teesdale, but I'm afraid that you'll have to."
"Why should I," cried David, smacking his hand down on the table, "when
you owe me a hundred and thirty? Twenty is all I ask, for I know how you are
situated; but twenty I must and shall have."
"We simply haven't it in the bank."
"Nay, come, I can't believe that."
 "I'll show you the pass-book."
"I won't look at it. No, I shall put the matter into the hands of a solicitor.
Good evening to you. I dare say it isn't your fault; but I must have some
satisfaction, one way or the other. I am not going on like this a single day
longer."
"Good evening, then, Mr. Teesdale. If you do what you say, we shall have
to liquidate; and then you will get nothing at all, or very little." David had
heard this story before. "It was an evil day for me when I sent you my first
load of milk," he cried out bitterly; but in the other's words there had been
such a ring of truth as took all the sting out of his own.
"It will be a worse one for us when you send me your last," replied the man
of business. "That would be enough to finish us in itself, without your
solicitor, in our present state; whereas, if you give us time——"
"I have given you too much time already," said the farmer, heaving the sigh
which was ever the end of all his threats; and with a sudden good-humoured
resignation (which put his nature in a nutshell), he got up and went away, after
an amicable discussion on the exceeding earliness of summer with the man for
whom he was no match at all. Throughout his life there had been far too many
men who were more than a match for poor David in all such matters.
But the getting of the twenty pounds was a matter apart. He did not want it
for himself; the person in need of the money was the child of his dear old
friend, who had charged her to apply to him, David, in precisely that kind of
difficulty which had already arisen. The fact made the old man's heart hot on
one side and cold on the other; for while it glowed with pride at the trust
reposed in him, it froze within his breast at the thought of his own helplessness
to fulfil that trust. This, however, was a thought which he obstinately refused
to entertain. He had not twenty pounds in the bank; on the contrary, his
account was overdrawn to the utmost limit. For himself, he would have
starved rather than borrow from his friend the innkeeper; but he could have
brought himself to do so for Miriam, had he not been perfectly certain that his
old servant would refuse to lend. In all Melbourne there was no other to whom
he could go for the twenty pounds; yet have it he must, by hook or crook, that
night; and ten minutes after his fruitless interview with the middleman who
sold his milk, a way was shown him.
He was hanging about the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets,
watching the multitude with an absent, lack-lustre eye; the post-office clock
had chimed the hour overhead, and David, still absently, had taken his own
cherished watch from his waistcoat pocket to check its time. It was not on his
last day in Melbourne, nor on his last but one, that the watch had been set by
the post-office clock, yet it was still right to the minute; and before the eighth
clang from above had been swallowed in the city's hum, David had got his
idea. He closed the gold case with a decisive snap, and next moment went in
feverish quest of the nearest pawnbroker.
It was with a face strangely drawn between joy and regret, between guilt
and triumph, that Mr. Teesdale at length returned to his inn. Here, in the
writing-room, now with the scared frown of a forger, and now with a senile
giggle, he cowered over a blotting-pad for some minutes; and thereafter
returned to the post-office with a sealed envelope, which he shot into safety
with his own hands. It was well after nine before the horse was put to, and
David seated once more in the buggy, with the collar of his dust-coat turned up
about his ears and the apron over his long lean legs.
"Never knew you so late before, old man," said his former servant, who
was smoking a cigar in the yard, and perhaps still thinking of his first snub
from David Teesdale.
"No, I don't think you ever did," replied David, blandly.
"Second time in to-day, too."
"Second time in," repeated Mr. Teesdale, drawing the reins through his
fingers.
"And it'll take you a good hour to get home. I say, you'll be getting into
trouble. You won't be there before——What time is it now, old man?"
"Look at the post-office," said David, as he took up his whip.
"I can't see it without going out into the street; besides, I always thought
they took their time from that wonderful watch of yours?"
"You're a clever fellow!" cried David, as the other had never heard him
speak in the whole course of their previous acquaintance; and he was gone
without another word.
He drove away with a troubled face; but the Melbourne street-lamps
showed deeper furrows under the old tall hat than David carried with him into
the darkness beyond the city, for the more he thought of it, the surer did he
become that his late action was not only defensible, but rather praiseworthy
into the bargain. There was about it, moreover, a dramatic fitness which
charmed him no less because he did not know the name for it. Throughout his
unsuccessful manhood he had treasured a watch, which was as absurd in his
pocket as a gold-headed cane in a beggarman's hand, because Oliver had given
it to him. For years it must have mocked him whenever he took it from his
shabby pocket, but in the narrowest straits he had never parted with it, nor had
his gold watch ever ceased to be David Teesdale's most precious possession.
And now, after two-and-thirty years, he had calmly pawned it, on the spur of
the moment, and, as it seemed to himself, for the most extraordinary and
beautiful reason in the world; for what he could never bring himself to do in
his own need he had done in a moment for the extravagant behoof of his
friend's daughter; and his heart beat higher than for many a year in the joy of
his deed. So puffed up was he, indeed, that he forgot the fear of Mrs. Teesdale,
and some other things besides; for at the foot of the last hill, within a mile of
the farm, the horse shied so suddenly that David, taken off his guard, found his
near wheels in the ditch before he could haul in the slack of the reins; and
when another plunge might have overturned the buggy, a man ran out of the
darkness to the horse's head, and before David could realise what had
happened his ship had righted itself and was at anchor in the middle of the
road.
"My fault, as I'm a sinner!" cried a rich voice from near the horse's ears.
"Nay, I'm very much obliged to you," said Mr. Teesdale, with a laugh, for
he made no work of a bit of danger, much less when past.
"But it was me your horse shied at," returned the other, and fell to petting
the frightened animal with soft words and a soothing hand. "I was going to
take the liberty of stopping you for a moment."
"I never saw you," said David; "it was that dark, and I was that busy
thinking. What is it I can do for you? The horse 'll stand steady now, thank
you, if you'll come this way."
The wayfarer came round to the buggy wheels and stood still, feeling in all
his pockets before answering questions. The near lamp shot its rays upon a
broad, deep chest, and showed a pair of hairy hands searching one pocket after
another. The rays reached as high as a scarlet neckcloth, but no higher, so that
the man's face was not very easily visible; and David was only beginning to
pick out of the night a heavy moustache, and a still heavier jaw, when from
between the two there came the gleam of teeth, and the fellow was laughing a
little and swearing more. He had given up his search, and stood empty-handed
under the lamp.
"I'm not a bushranger," said he, "but you might easily think me one."
"Why so?" asked David.
"Because I stopped you to ask for a match to light my pipe, and now I'm
hanged if I can find my pipe in any of my pockets; and it was the best one ever
I smoked," said the man, with more of his oaths.
"That's a bad job," said David, sympathetically, in spite of a personal
horror of bad language, which was one of his better peculiarities.
"A bad job?" cried the man. "It would be that if I'd lost my pipe, but it's a
damned sight worse when it's a girl that goes and shakes it from you, and she
the biggest little innocent you ever clapped eyes on. Yet she must have shook
it. Confound her face!"
He was feeling in his pockets again, but as unsuccessfully as before. The
farmer inquired whether he was on his way back to Melbourne, and suggested
it was a long walk.
"It is so," said the man; "but it's a gay little town when you get there, is
Melbourne—what?"
"Very," said Mr. Teesdale, to be civil; but he was beginning to find this
difficult.
"You prefer the country—what?" continued the other, who was now
leaning on the wheel, and showing a face which the old man liked even less
than the rest of him, it was so handsome and yet so coarse. "Well, so do I, for a
change. And talk of the girls!" The fellow winked. "Old Country or Colonies,
it's all the same—you give me a country lass for a lark that's worth having. But
damn their souls when they lose your favourite pipe!"
"What sort of a pipe was it?" asked David, to change a conversation which
he disliked. "If I come across it I'll send it to you, if you tell me where to."
"Good, old man!" cried the stranger. "It was a meerschaum, with a lady's
hand holding of the bowl, and coloured better than any pipe ever you saw in
your life. If you do find it, you leave it with the boss of the 'Bushman's Rest';
then I'll get it again when next I come this way—to see my girl. For I can't
quite think she's the one to have touched it, when all's skid and done."
"Very good," said David, coldly, because both look and word of this
roadside acquaintance were equally undesirable in his eyes. "Very good, if I
find it. And now, if you'll allow me, I'll push on home."
The other showed himself as ready with a sneer as with an oath. "You are
in a desperate hurry!" said he.
"I am," said David; "nevertheless, I'm much obliged to you for being so
clever with the horse just now, and I wish you a very good night." And with
that, showing for once some little decision, because this kind of man repelled
him, old Tees-dale cracked his whip and drove on without more ado.
Nor is it likely he would have thought any more about so trifling an
incident, but for another which occurred before he finally reached home. It
was at his own slip-rails, not many minutes later; he had got down and taken
them out, and was in the act of leading through, when his foot kicked
something hard and small, so that it rattled against one of the rails, and shone
in the light of the buggy lamp at the same instant. The farmer stopped to pick
it up, found it a meerschaum pipe, and pulled a grave face over it for several
moments. Then he slipped it into his pocket, and after putting up the rails
behind him, was in his own yard in three minutes. Here one of the men took
charge of horse and buggy, and the master went round to the front of the
house, but must needs stand in the verandah to spy on Arabella, who was
sitting with her Family Cherub under the lamp and the blind never drawn. She
was not reading; her head was lifted, and she was gazing at the window—at
himself, David imagined; but he was wrong, for she never saw him. Her face
was flushed, and there was in it a wonder and a stealthy joy, born of the
romantic reading under her nose, as the father thought; but he was wrong
again; for Arabella had finished one chapter before the coming of Missy, and
had sat an hour over the next without taking in a word.
"So you've got back, father?" she was saying presently, in an absent,
mechanical sort of voice.
"Here I am," said Mr. Teesdale; "and I left Missy at the theatre, where it
appears she had to meet——"
"Missy!" exclaimed Arabella, remembering very suddenly. "Oh yes! Of
course. Where do you say you left her, father?"
"At the Bijou Theatre, my dear, I am sorry to say; but it wasn't her fault; it
was the friends she is staying with whom she had to meet there. Well, let's
hope it won't do her any harm just once in a way. And what have you been
doing, my dear, all the evening?"
"I? Oh, after milking I had a bit of a stroll outside."
"A stroll, eh? Then you didn't happen to see a man hanging about our slip-
rails, did you?"
Mr. Teesdale was emptying his pockets, with his back to Arabella, so he
never knew how his question affected her.
"I wasn't near the slip-rails, I was in the opposite direction," she said
presently. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I found this right under them," said Mr. Teesdale, showing her
the meerschaum pipe before laying it down on the chimney-piece; "and as I
was getting near the township, I met a man who told me he'd lost just such a
pipe. And I didn't like him, my dear, so I only hope he's not coming after our
Mary Jane, that's all."
Mary Jane was the farm-servant. She had not been out of the kitchen since
milking-time, said Arabella; and her father was remarking that he was glad to
hear this, when the door flew open, and Mrs. Teesdale whistled into the room
like a squall of wind.
 "At last!" she cried. "Do you know how long you've been, David? Do you
know what time it is?"
"I don't, my dear," said he.
"Then look at your watch."
"My dear," he said, "I've left my watch in Melbourne."
"In Melbourne!" cried Mrs. Teesdale among her top notes. "And what's the
meaning of that?"
"It means," said Mr. Teesdale, struggling to avoid the lie direct, "that it
hasn't been cleaned for years, and that it needed cleaning very badly indeed."
"But you told Miriam how well it was going; time we were having our
teas!"
"Yes, I know, and—that's the curious thing, my dear. It went and stopped
on our way in." For there was no avoiding it, after all; yet in all the long years
of their married life, it was his first.

CHAPTER VI.—THE WAYS OF SOCIETY.

The Monday following was the first and the best of some bad days at the
farm; for Missy had never written to tell Mr. Teesdale when and where he
might call for her, so he could not call at all, and she did not come out by
herself. This they now firmly expected her to do, and David wasted much time
in meeting every omnibus; but when the last one had come in without Missy,
even he was forced to give her up for that day. There would be a letter of
explanation in the morning, said David, and shut his ears to his wife's answer.
She had been on tenter-hooks all day, forever diving into the spare room with a
duster, dodging out again to inquire what time it was now, and then scolding
David because he had not his watch—a circumstance for which that simpleton
was reproaching himself before long.
For there was no letter in the morning, and no Missy next day, or the next,
or the next after that. It was then that Mr. Teesdale took to lying awake and
thinking much of the friendly ticking that had cheered his wakefulness for
thirty years, and even more of a few words in the Thursday's Argus, which he
had not shown to a soul. And strange ideas concerning the English girl were
bandied across the family board; but the strangest of all were John William's,
who would not hear a word against her; on the contrary, it was his father, in his
opinion, who was to blame for the whole matter, which the son of the house
declared to be a mere confusion of one Monday with another.
 "You own yourself," said he, "that the girl wanted a new rig-out before
she'd come here to stay. Did she say so, father, or did she not? Very well, then.
Do you mean to tell me she could get measured, and tried on, and fixed up all
round in four days, and two of 'em Saturday and Sunday? Then I tell you that's
your mistake, and it wasn't Monday she said, but Monday week, which is next
Monday. You mark my words, we'll have her out here next Monday as ever
is!"
How John William very nearly hit the mark, and how shamefully Arabella
missed it with the big stones she had been throwing all the week—how rest
returned to the tortured mind of Mr. Teesdale, and how Mrs. T. was not sorry
that she had left the clean good sheets on the spare bed in spite of many a good
mind to put them away again—all this is a very short story indeed. For Missy
reappeared on the Saturday afternoon while they were all at tea.
Arabella was the one who caught first sight of the red sunshade bobbing up
the steep green ascent of the farmhouse, for Arabella sat facing the window;
but it was left to John William to turn in his chair and recognise the tall, well-
dressed figure at a glance as it breasted the hill.
"Here she is—here's Miriam!" he cried out instantly. "Now what did I tell
you all?" He was rolling down his shirt-sleeves as he spoke, flushed with
triumph.
Mr. Teesdale had risen and pressed forward to peer through the window,
and as he did so the red sunshade waved frantically. Beneath it was a neat
straw hat, and an unmistakable red-fringed face nodding violently on top of a
frock of vestal whiteness. Arabella flew out to meet the truant, and John
William to put on a coat.
"Well, well!" said Mr. Teesdale, holding both her hands when the girl was
once more among them. "Well, to be sure; but you're just in time for tea, that's
one good thing."
"Nay, I must make some fresh," cried his wife, without a smile. "Mind, I
do think you might have written, Miriam. You have led us a pretty dance, I can
tell you that." She caught up the teapot and whisked out of the room.
"Have I?" the girl asked meekly of the old man.
"No, no, my dear," and "Not you," the two Teesdales answered in one
breath; though the father added, "but you did promise to write."
"I know I did. But you see——"
Missy laughed.
"You should have written, my dear," David said gently, as she got no
further, and he had no wish to cross-question her. "I didn't know what had got
you."
"None of us could think," added Arabella.
"Except me, Miriam," said John William, proudly. "You were getting your
new rig-out; wasn't that it?"
The girl nodded and beamed at him as she said that it was. The sunshade
was lying on the sofa now, and Missy sitting at the table in Arabella's place.
"I thought," said Mr. Teesdale, "that you had gone off to Sydney, and
weren't coming near us any more. Do you know why? There was a Miss
Oliver in the list of the overland passengers in Thurday's Argus."
"Indeed," said the girl.
"Yes, and it was a Miss M. Oliver, and all."
"Well, I never! That's what you'd call a coincident, if you like."
"I'm very glad it was nothing worse," said Mr. Teesdale heartily. "I made
that sure it was you."
"You never mentioned it, father?" said John William.
"No, because I was also quite sure that she would write if we only gave her
time. You ought to have written, Missy, and then I'd have gone in and fetched
you——"
"But that's just what I didn't want. All this way! No, the 'bus was quite
good enough for me."
"But what about your trunk?" Arabella inquired.
Missy made answer in the fewest words that her trunk was following by
carrier; and because Mrs. Teesdale entered to them now, with a pot of fresh
tea, Missy said little more just then, except in specific apology for her
remissness in not writing. This apology was made directly to Mrs. Teesdale,
whose manner of receiving it may or may not have discouraged the visitor
from further conversation at the moment. But so it seemed to one or two, who
heard and saw and felt that such discouragement would exist eternally
between that old woman and that young girl.
Milking-time was at hand, however, and Missy was left to finish her tea
with only Mr. Teesdale to look after her. John William and his mother were the
two best milkers on the farm, and Arabella was a fair second to them when she
liked, but that was not this evening. Her heart was with Missy in the parlour.
But Missy herself was far better suited in having the old farmer all to herself.
With him she was entirely at her ease. The moment they were alone she was
thanking David for the twenty pounds duly received at the post-office, and his
immediate stipulation that the matter of the loan must be a secret made it also
an additional bond of sympathy between these two. They sat chatting about
England and Miriam's parents, but not more than Missy could help. She
referred but lightly to a home-letter newly received, as though there was no
news in it; she was much more ready to hear how Mr. Teesdale had had the
coat torn off his back in rescuing his first home-letters from the tiny post-
office of the early days, which had been swept away by the first wave of the
gold-rush. Again he spoke of that golden age, and of his own lost chances,
without a perceptible shade of regret, and again Missy marvelled; as did Mr.
Teesdale yet again, and in his turn, at her tone about money who had been
brought up in the midst of it. It only showed the good sense of his old friend in
keeping his children simple and careful amid all their rich surroundings; but
Mr. Oliver had been ever the most sensible, as well as the kindest of men. The
farmer said this as he was walking slowly in the paddock, with a pipe in his
mouth and Missy on his arm, and his downcast eyes upon the long, broken
shadow of his own bent figure. Missy's trunk came about this time, but she let
it alone. And these two were feeding the chickens together—old David's own
department—when Arabella came seeking Missy, having escaped from the
milking-stool a good hour before her time.
"Oh, here you are! Come, and I'll help you unpack. Mother said I was to,"
said she hurriedly. She was only in a hurry for Missy's society. So Missy went
with her, getting a good-humoured nod from the old man, whose side she was
sorry to leave.
And David watched her out of sight, smiling his calm, kind smile. "She's
her father's daughter," said he to the chickens. "Her ways are a bit new to me
—but that's where I like 'em. Mannerisms she may have—I wouldn't have her
otherwise. She's one of the rising generation—but she has her father's heart,
and that's the best kind that ever beat time."
In Missy's bedroom much talking was being done by Arabella. Her
curiosity was insatiable, but she herself never gave it a chance. She wanted to
know this, but before there was time for an answer she must know that. One
thing, when the trunk was unpacked and its contents put away in drawers, she
was left entirely unable to understand; and that was, how Missy came to have
everything brand-new.
"Why, because everything was spoilt," said Missy, in apparent wonder at
the other's wonderment.
"By that one wave?"
"Why, of course."
"But how did it happen?"
 "Didn't I tell you? We'd left the window open, and in comes a green sea
and half fills the cabin. The captain, he was ever so wild, and, oh my! didn't he
give it us! Of course, all our things were spoilt—me and the other girls. We
finished the voyage in borrowed everything, and in borrowed everything I
came here the other day. Did you think them things were mine? Not much, my
dear. Not much! But I was forced to have things of my own before I could
come out here and stay."
Arabella, sitting on the bed, studied the tall figure with arms akimbo that
struck sharp through the dusk against the square-paned window. She was
wondering whether the Olivers were such well-to-do people after all. Her own
English was not perfect, but her ear was better than her tongue, and the young
ladies in the Family Cherub spoke not at all as Missy spoke. Arabella's next
question seemed irrelevant.
"Did you see much society at home, Missy?"
"You bet I did!" was the answer, and the fuzzy head was nodding against
the window.
"Real high society, like you read about in tales, Missy?"
"Rather!"
"Lords?"
"Any jolly quantity of lords!"
"You really mean it, Missy?"
"Mean it? What do you mean? Look here, I won't tell you no more if you
think I'm telling lies."
"Missy, I never thought of such a thing—never!" Arabella hastened to aver.
"I was only surprised, that's all I was.'Tisn't likely I meant to doubt your
word."
"Didn't you? That's all right, then. Why, bless your heart, do you think it so
wonderful to know a few lords?"
"I didn't think they were as common as all that," said Arabella, meekly.
"Common as mud," cried Missy grandly. "Why, you can't swing a cat
without knocking a lord's topper off—not in England!"
Arabella laughed. Then her questions ceased for the time being, and Missy
was curious to know how she had impressed a rather tiresome interlocutor, for
now in the bedroom it was impossible for them to see each other's faces. A
few minutes later Missy was satisfied on this point. At the supper-table she
had no more attentive listener than Arabella, who watched her in the lamplight
as one who has merely read watches another who has seen and done, while
Missy rattled on more freely than she had done yet before Mrs. Teesdale. Even
Mrs. Teesdale was made to smile this time, though she did her best to conceal
it. The visitor was in such racy form.
"I may have to go back home again any day," she told them all. "It'll
depend how my mother is, and how they all get on without me. I'll bet they
manage pretty badly. But while I am here I mean to make the most of my time.
A short life and a merry one, them's my sentiments, ladies and gentlemen! So I
want to learn to shoot and milk and do everything but ride. I could ride if I
wanted to; I learnt when I was a kid; but a horse once——"
She broke off, laughing and nodding knowingly at Mr. Teesdale, who
explained how Missy had been once bitten and was twice shy. John William
said that he could very well understand it; and he offered to take Missy out
'possum-shooting as soon as ever there was a moon.
"Have you ever fired a gun, Missy?" said Mr. Teesdale; and Missy shook
her head.
"P'r'aps you wouldn't like to try?" said John William.
"Wouldn't I so!" cried the girl, with flashing eyes. "You show me how, and
I'll try to-morrow."
"To-morrow's Sunday," Mrs. Teesdale said solemnly. "Is your cup off,
Miriam?"
It was not, and because the cocoa was too hot for her Missy poured it into
the saucer, and drank until her face was all saucer and red fringe. This
impressed Arabella.
"We'll soon teach Missy to shoot," remarked Mr. Teesdale, smiling into his
plate, "if she'll hold the gun tight and not mind the noise."
"I'll do my level," said Missy gamely.
John William proceeded to assure her that she could not be taught by a
better man than his father, whom he declared to be the best shot in that colony
for his age. The old man looked pleased, praise from his son being a very rare
treat to him. But Arabella had been neglecting her supper to watch and listen
to the guest, and now she asked, "Do the fine ladies shoot in England, Missy?"
"Not they!" replied Missy promptly. "I should like to catch them."
"What ladies do you mean, my dear?" asked the farmer of his daughter.
"Grand ladies—countesses and viscountesses and the rest. Missy knows
heaps of them—don't you, Missy?"
 "Well, a good few," said Missy, with some show of modesty.
"To be sure you would," murmured Mr. Tees-dale, adding, as his eyes
glistened, "and yet you'll come and stay with the likes of us! You aren't too
proud to take us as you find us—you aren't above drinking cocoa with your
supper."
"What do the lords and ladies drink with their suppers?" asked Arabella, as
Missy smiled and blushed.
But the farmer cried, "Their dinners, she means; I'll warrant they dine late
every night o' their lives."
Missy nodded to this.
"But what do they drink with their dinners?" repeated Arabella.
"Oh, champagne."
"What else?"
"What else? Oh! claret, and port, and sherry wine. And beer and spirits for
them that prefers 'em!"
"All that with their dinners?"
"Rather! I should think they did. The whole lot, one after the other!"
"What! Beer and brandy and sherry wine?" Arabella's incredulity was
disagreeably apparent.
"Yes, everything you can think of; but look here, if you don't want to
believe me, you needn't, you know!" said Missy, turning as red as her fringe as
she stared the other girl full in the eyes across the supper-table. In the
awkward pause following John William turned and glared furiously at his
sister; but it was their father who cleared the air by saying mildly:
"Arabella, my dear, I'm afraid you don't know a joke when you hear one."
Then Arabella coloured in her turn.
"Do you mean to say you were joking, Missy?" she leant forward to ask; as
though she could no more believe this than recent statements.
But Missy had given one quick glance at Mr.
Teesdale, and then, with a little gasp, had burst into an immoderate fit of
laughter.
"Of course I was," she cried out as soon as she could speak; "of course I
was joking—you old silly!"
 CHAPTER VII.—MOONLIGHT SPORT.

So the first few days were largely spent in teaching Missy to shoot. A very
plucky pupil she made, too, if not a particularly apt one; but head and chief of
her sporting qualities was her enthusiasm. That was intense. The girl was
never happy without a gun in her hand. So far as safety went, she took
palpable pains to follow every injunction in the matter of full-cock and half-
cock, and laid to heart all the rules given her for the carrying and handling of a
loaded firearm. Thus, no one feared her prowling about the farm on tiptoe with
John William's double-barrels pointing admirably to earth; least of all, the
sparrows and parrots which she never hit. Old Teesdale would go with her and
stand chuckling at her side when she missed a sparrow sitting; once he
snatched the smoking gun from her, and with the other barrel picked off the
same small bird on the wing. Then there was much practice at folded
newspapers, of which Missy could sometimes make a sieve, at her own range;
and altogether these two shots enjoyed themselves. Certainly it was a sight to
see them together—the weak-kneed old man, who could shoot so cleverly still,
when he had a mind, and the jaunty young woman who was all slang and fun
and rollicking good-nature, plus a cockney lust for blood and feathers.
Missy's first feathers, however, were not such as she might stick in her hat,
and her first blood was exceedingly ill-shed. To be sure, she knew no better
until the deed was done, and the quaint dead bird with the big head and beak
carried home in triumph to Mr. Teesdale. That triumph was short-lived.
"Got one at last!" cried Missy, as she dropped her prey at the old man's
feet. Mr. Teesdale was smoking in the verandah, and he pulled a long face
behind his smile.
"So I see," said he; "but do you know what it is you have got, Missy?"
"No, I don't, but I mean to have him stuffed, whatever he is."
"I think I wouldn't, Missy, if I were you. It's a laughing jackass."
"Yes? Well, I guess he won't laugh much more!"
"And there's a five-pound penalty for shooting him, Missy. He kills the
snakes, therefore you are not allowed by law to kill him. You have broken the
law, my dear, and the best thing that we can do is to bury the victim and say
nothing about it to anybody." He was laughing, but the girl stood looking at
her handiwork with a very red face.
"I thought I was to shoot everything," she said. "I thought that everything
eat the fruit and things. I never knew I was so beastly cruel!"
 She put away the gun, and spent most of that summer's day in reading to
Mr. Teesdale, for whom she had developed a very pretty affection. They read
longest in the parlour, with the window shut, and the blind down, and a big fly
buzzing between it and the glass. The old man fell sound asleep in the end,
whereupon Missy sat very still indeed, just to watch him. And what it was
exactly in the worn and white-haired face that fetched the tears to her eyes and
the shame to her cheeks, on this particular occasion, there is no saying; but
Missy was scarcely Missy during the remainder of the afternoon.
That evening, however, had already been pitched upon for some 'possum-
shooting, given a good moon. From the moment she was reminded of this, at
tea-time, the visitor was herself again, and something more. It is saying a good
deal, but they had not hitherto seen her in such excessively high spirits as
overcame her now. She lent Mr. Tees-dale a hand to load some cartridges in
the gunroom while the others were milking; but she was rather a hindrance
than a help to that patient old man. She would put in the shot before the
powder. Then she got into pure infantile mischief, letting off caps under
David's coat-tails, and doing her best to make him sharp with her. Herein she
failed; nevertheless, the elder was glad enough to hand her over to the younger
Teesdale when the time came, and with it a moon without a cloud. Neither
Arabella nor her father was going, but three of the men were who worked on
the place, and with whom John William was obliged to leave Missy alone in
the yard while he went for the dogs. It was only for a minute or two; but the
men were in fits of laughter when he returned. It appeared that Missy had been
giving them some sort of a dance under that limelit moon.
"Down, Major! Down, Laddie!" John William cried at the dogs as they
leaped up at Missy.
But Missy answered, "Down yourself, Jack—I like 'em." And the three
men laughed; in fact, they seemed prepared to laugh at Missy whenever she
opened her mouth; but John William laughed too as he led the way into the
moonlit paddocks.
Here the hunting-ground began without preliminary, for on this side of the
farm there were trees and to spare, the land dipping in a gully full of timber
before it rose to the high ploughed levels known as the Cultivation. The gully
was well grassed for all its trees, which were divers as well as manifold. There
were gum-trees blue and red, and stringy-barks, and she-oaks, each and all of
them a haunt of the opossum and the native cat. The party promptly
surrounded a blue gum at the base of which the dogs stood barking, and Missy
found herself doing what the others did—getting the moon behind the
branches and searching for what she was told would look more like the stump
of a bough or a tangle of leaves than any known animal.
 "I believe it's a lie," said John William; "for Laddie barked first, and
Laddie always did tell lies."
"Tell lies?" echoed Missy, with a puzzled grin.
"Yes, barking up trees where there's nothing at all—that's what we call
telling lies; and old Laddie's started the evening well by telling one already."
"Not he," cried a shrill voice; and the youngest of the three farm-hands—a
little bit of a fellow—stood pointing to a branch so low that everyone else had
overlooked it.
"I see a little bit of a knot on the bough," said Missy, "but blow me tight if
I see anything else!"
"That's it," cried John William. "That little knot is a native cat."
Missy lowered her gun at once. "Oh, I didn't come out," said she, "to shoot
cats!"
"But they aren't cats at all," Teesdale explained (while his men stood and
laughed); "they're much more like little leopards, I assure you. We only call
them cats because—because I'm bothered if I know why! It's not the name for
them, as you'll say when you've shot this beggar. And you don't know the way
they tear our fowls to pieces, Missy, or you wouldn't make so many bones
about it; besides which, you won't get an easier shot all night."
"Oh, if that's the kind of customer, I'm on to try," said Missy. She raised
her gun there and then, pressed it to her shoulder, and took aim at the black
notch against the silver disc of the moon. The moonlight licked the barrels
from sight to sight, getting into Missy's eyes, but there were barely a dozen
feet between muzzle and mark. The report was quickly followed by a lifeless
thud upon the ground; and when the smoke cleared, that notch was gone from
the bough. Then one of the men struck a match to show Missy what she had
done; and she had done it so effectually as to give herself a sensation which
she concealed with difficulty. It was not pity; there was no pitying a spotted
little horror with so sharp a snout and such devilish fangs: but whatever it was,
that sensation kept Missy modest in her success, so that she refused the next
shot point-blank. John William took it, with the only possible result.
"A bushy." someone said, turning over the dead bush-tailed opossum with
his foot It looked very big and soft and gray, lying dead in the moonlight.
Missy found it in her heart to pity an opossum.
"Don't you skin them?" she asked at a respectful range. "Do you make no
use of them after all?"
"It's so hard not to spoil them," John William said as he slipped another
cartridge into the breech. He would have shown her how this particular skin
had been ruined by the shot, but Missy said she quite understood.
He was beginning to think her squeamish. He asked her whether she had
not had enough. She would not admit it, and took another shot to prove her
spirit. This time she failed, and bore her failure with an equanimity which (in
Missy) amounted almost to apathy. That she was neither squeamish nor
apathetic, however, was demonstrated very suddenly while the night was still
young.
A ring-tailed opossum had been brought to earth by a charge from the
muzzle-loader of that stunted young colonial whose eyes were as sharp as his
voice—he who had "mooned" the native cat. The others called him Geordie.
The three of them were kneeling over the dead "ringy," and Missy was taking
no more notice of them than she could help; only Geordie's was a voice that
made itself heard. Missy had taken little stock of what the kneeling men were
doing or saying until suddenly she heard:
"Young'uns it is! I told you there was young 'uns! That little beggar's as
dead as his mother, but this one ain't. 'Ere, come off 'er back, can't yer? She
ain't no more good to you now, do you 'ear?"
This was Geordie's manner of speech to the bunch of breathing fur that
stuck tight to the dead doe's back, whence his fingers were busy disengaging
it; but Geordie suddenly found himself on his back in the grass, and when he
picked himself up it was Miss Oliver herself who was kneeling where he had
knelt, and even going on with his work. It took her some moments, and when
done her hands were bloody in the moonshine. Then, first she took that bit of
warm fur and nursed it in her neck, stroking it with her chin. And next she
turned a calm face up to her companions, and said distinctly to them all, "I call
this a damned shame, so I tell you straight!" Indeed she was anything but
squeamish.
She lowered her eyes immediately, undid three buttons, and slipped the
small opossum into her bosom. There she fixed it, with great care, but not the
smallest fuss; and looking up once more, saw the three hirelings walking off
together through the trees.
"I tell you," she called after them—shaking her fist at their backs—"I tell
you it's the damnedest shame that ever was!"
The words rang clear through the clear night, then found an answer at
Missy's side. "You are quite right. It is. And now won't you get up and come
back home, Missy?"
"Jack!" cried the girl faintly, as she stumbled to her feet. "I'd quite
forgotten you were there."
 "I have been here all the time," said John William.
"Then do tell me what I've been saying," said Missy, anxiously, as she took
his arm and they started homeward. "I couldn't see no more and keep my scalp
fixed. I hope to God I haven't been swearing, have I?"
"Not you, Missy. You've only said what was right and proper. It was cruel,
and I blame myself for the whole thing."
"No, no, no! I wanted some sport. I thought I could kill things, and never
give a—no, never give a thought to 'em. Now I know I can't. That's all. I say,
though, if I did use a swear-word, you won't give me away, will you? I don't
know what I said, and that's all about it; but when I lose my scalp—ah well, I
know I can trust you."
"Of course you can," said John William cheerily. And involuntarily he
pressed to his side the hand that was still within his arm.
"I wouldn't say swear-words unless I did lose my scalp—you understand?"
said Missy, coming back to it again.
"Of course you wouldn't; but you didn't."
"I'm not so sure. I wouldn't have your parents hear of it if I did; they'd take
it so terribly to heart."
"They shall hear nothing—not that there's anything for them to hear."
"Now my parents are different; they swear themselves."
"Come, I can't credit that, you know!"
"But they do—like troopers!" persisted the girl. "It's the fashion just now
in England. You may not know—how should you?"
"Missy," said John William, as he opened her the gate into the homestead
yard, "it's impossible to tell when you're joking and when you're not."
"Aha, I mean it to be," cried the girl, bowing low to him, with the moon all
over her. Then she stood up to her last inch, smiled full in his face, and
turning, left him that smile to keep if he could. He would have followed her,
but a burst of laughter in the men's room took him off his course, as good
reasons occurred to him for calling in there first.
The room was a part of one of the farm outhouses. In each corner was a
bunk, and on each bunk a man (counting Geordie), the fourth being one Old
Willie, a retired salt, who drove the milk into Melbourne in the middle of
every night. Old Willie was sitting on the side of his bunk and chuckling so
windily that the sparks were flying out of his cutty like fireworks. There was
nothing, however, to show which of the other three was the entertainer, for
each turned silent and looked guilty when John William entered and planted
himself in their midst.
"I just thought I'd tell you," said he, with forced blandness, "that there is to
be no more 'possum-shooting on this place for good and all. The man who
shoots another 'possum, I'll hide him with my own hands, and the man who
catches me shooting one, he may take and shoot me. For it's a grand shame,
men, it's a grand shame! You heard Miss Oliver say it was, didn't you?" he
added sharply, turning to the three.
For the moment they looked blank; the next, it was such a fierce person
who was repeating the question, with eyes so like pointed pistols, that one
after the other of those three men meekly perjured their souls.
"Exactly," said John William, nodding his head in a deadly calm. "She said
it was the grandest shame ever was; and if any man says she said anything else
—well, he'd better let me hear him, that's all!"

CHAPTER VIII.—THE SAVING OF ARABELLA.

One night early in December, Arabella burst into Missy's room with
singular abruptness. Missy had said good-night to the others and was very
nearly in bed, but she had not seen Arabella, who had been out all the evening.
Evidently she had only now come in. She was breathing quickly from hurrying
up-hill; and there was a light in her countenance which Missy noticed in due
course.
"Missy," she began, as abruptly as she had entered, "do you remember the
day you first came, and we showed you that group of you all taken when you
were quite little?"
Missy nodded in the looking-glass. She was busy with her fringe.
"Well," continued Arabella, "you said red came out light, talking of your
hair. Do you remember that?"
"Red came out light? No, I can't say I do."
"You must, Missy! You were speaking of your hair in that group———"
Missy flourished a brave bare arm. "Now I see. My poor old carrots! Of
course they came out light; they couldn't come out red, could they?"
"No; but I'm told that red comes out black—that's all."
Missy faced about in a twinkling. Her bare arms went akimbo. She was
pale.
"So that's what excited you, eh?" she cried derisively; yet it was only in the
moment of speaking that she perceived that Arabella was excited at all.
"I'm not excited, Missy!"
"No?"
"Not a bit," said Arabella, as she gave herself the scarlet lie from neck to
forehead. This amused Missy.
"Then what is it?" said she at last, with a provoking smile which the other
could not meet. "Is it only that you're just dying to bowl me out? All right, my
dear, we'll put it down to that. Only take care I don't bowl you out too—take
very good care that I don't find out something about you!"
Arabella had the pale face now.
"Take very extra special good care," continued Missy, nodding nastily,
"that I haven't found out something already!"
"Have you?"
The hoarse voice was unknown to Missy, and the frightened face seemed a
fresh face altogether. She read it in a moment, and was laughing the next.
"Of course I haven't, my good girl!"
"O Missy!"
"Just as if you'd done anything you'd mind being found out! No, my dear, I
was only having a lark with you; but you deserved it for having one with me.
Now as to my hair in that photograph——"
"Oh, but of course I believe you, Missy, and not—and not the person who
told me different."
"Now I wonder who that was?" said Missy to herself; but aloud—"That's a
blessing! And now if you'll let me go to bed, my dear, we'll neither of us think
any more of all this tommy-rot that we've been talking."
Nevertheless she herself thought about it half that night. And a variety of
vague suspicions crystallised at last into a single definite conclusion.
"She has a man on," muttered Missy to her pillow. "That's what's the
matter with Arabella."
Her mind was fully made up before she slept.
"I must find out something about it; what I do see I don't like; and I've just
got to take care of Arabella."
 Forthwith she set herself to watch. It was first of all necessary to become
really intimate with Arabella. The latter's addiction to personal catechism, to
name one thing, had kept Missy not a little aloof hitherto. Now, however, in
the nick of time, this weakness passed away, and with it this barrier. There
were no more questions asked obviously for the sake of doubting or
discrediting the answer. On the other hand, about some things Arabella was as
inquisitive as ever; especially to wit, Missy's love affairs. Curiously enough,
this was the one point on which Missy was markedly reticent, for very good
reasons of her own; but she had no objection to discussing with Arabella the
general subject of love. She noted the fascination this had for her companion.
When the latter came to speak of her male ideal, from the point of view of his
appearance, Missy noted much more. "He has a black moustache and very
dark eyes," said she to herself. "That's the kind I trust least of all!" She knew
something about it, evidently.
A tiny incident, however, which happened when Missy had been some five
or six weeks at the farm, told her more than Arabella had done, directly or
indirectly, in any of their conversations. The girls were in the room with Mr.
Teesdale, who was looking on the chimney-piece for a lost letter, when he
exclaimed suddenly:
"What's got that meerschaum pipe, Arabella?"
"Which one was that, father?" was the only answer, in a suspiciously
innocent voice.
"The one I picked up by our slip-rails the night I took Missy back to
Melbourne. It belonged to yon man I told you I met on the road. I was saving
it in case I ever set eyes on him again."
"Oh, that one!" cried Arabella; then, after a pause, she added, with a
nonchalance which Missy for one admired: "I gave it back to him the other
day."
"To whom?"
"Why, the man that lost it!"
"You gave it back—to the man that lost it?" cried David, in the greatest
surprise, while Missy became buried in the Argus of that morning. "Dear me,
where have you seen him, honey?"
"In the township."
"In the township, eh? Now what sort of a man was it that you saw in the
township? Tell me what he was like."
"Like? Oh, he had—let's see—he had very dark eyes; oh, yes, and a dark
moustache and all; and he was very—well, rather handsome, I thought him."
 "Ay, that's near enough," said Mr. Teesdale, greatly puzzled; "quite near
enough to satisfy me that he's the same man; but how in the world did you
know that he was? That's what I can't make out!"
"Why, he told me himself, to be sure!"
"Ay, but how came he to speak to you at all? That's what I want to know."
"Then I'm sure I can't tell you," said Arabella, with a toss of her head, not
badly done. "I suppose he saw where I came from, and I dare say he'd been
leaning again' our slip-rails that night he lost his pipe. Anyhow, he asked me
whether I'd found one, and I said you had, and he described the one he'd lost,
and I knew that must be it. So I came back and got it for him. That was all."
Mr. Teesdale seemed just a little put out. "I wonder you didn't say anything
about it at the time, my dear," said he, in mild remonstrance.
"Me? Why, I never thought any more of it," the young woman said, with a
slightly superfluous laugh. "I—you see that was the first and last I'd seen of
him," added Arabella, as if to end the discussion; but her father had not
finished his say.
"I'm glad it was the last, however—I am glad of that!" he exclaimed with
unusual energy. "Why? Because, my dear, little as I saw of him, I didn't like
the cut of that man's jib. No," said Mr. Teesdale, letting his eyes travel through
the window to the river-timber, and shaking his head decidedly, as he sat down
in his accustomed seat; "no, I didn't like it at all; and very sorry I should have
been to think a man of that stamp was coming here after our Mary Jane!"
And Missy said never a word; but neither word, look nor tone had escaped
her.
Her eyes were very wide open now. Arabella went out more evenings than
one, but never, it appeared, on two consecutive evenings; so the man was not
living in the district. And Missy said so much the worse; he was not merely
passing his time. To clinch matters, the unhappy girl began to hang out signs
of sleepless nights and perpetual nervous preoccupation by day; signs which
Missy alone interpreted aright.
At length, a little before Christmas, there came a night when Arabella
kissed them all round and went off to her room much earlier than usual. And
the fever in her eyes and lips was noted by Missy, and by Missy alone.
It was a night of stars only. The moon by which Missy had killed her one
native cat, and nursed an infant opossum, had waxed and waned. The night,
when Mr. Teesdale took a breath of it last thing, looked black as soot. Twenty
minutes later, the farmhouse was in utter darkness; not a single ray from a
single window; and so it remained for nearly two hours.
 Then suddenly a light shone in the parlour for a single instant only. The
outer door of the little gun-room was now opened, as noiselessly as might be,
and shut again, hairbreadth by hairbreadth. The odd thing was, that this
happened not once, but twice within five minutes. And each time it was a
woman's figure that stood up under the stars, and then stole forth into the
night.
There were two of them; and while the first went swiftly in a given
direction (towards the timbered gully), the second made a quick circuit of the
premises, and, as it happened, intercepted the first among the trees as though
she had been lying in wait there for hours. Then it was "O Missy!" and
Arabella uttered a stifled, terrified scream.
"Yes, it's Missy," said that young woman soberly. "And I wonder what
we're doing out here at this time of night, both of us?"
"I'm having a walk," said Arabella, giggling half hysterically.
"That's exactly what I'm doing; so we can walk together."
"You've followed me out, you mean liar!" cried Arabella, with wholly
hysterical wrath. She had, indeed, been for pushing forward after the first
shock, but when Missy stepped out alongside there was nothing for it but a
pitched battle on the spot.
"I have so," said Missy. "I know all about it, you see."
"All about what?"
"What you are after."
"And what am I after, since you're so mighty clever?"
"You're meeting that man."
"What man?" Arabella was quaking pitifully. "The man you're always
meeting; but to-night you meant to run away with him."
"Spy!" said Arabella. "What makes you think that?"
"You have put on all your best things."
"But what makes you think there is a man at all?"
"Oh, I saw that ages ago; though mind you, I have never seen him. It is the
man with the meerschaum pipe, now isn't it?"
Arabella's first answer was a shaking fist. Next moment she was shaking
all over, in a storm of tears during which Missy took hold of her with both
arms, was thrown off, took a fresh hold, and was then suffered to keep it. At
last she asked:
 "Where were you to meet him, Arabella?"
The answer came with more sobs than words. "At the top corner of the
Cultivation: the road corner: he is to wait there till I come."
"Good!" said Missy. "That's half a mile away, and where we are is out of
hearing of the house. Not so sure, eh? Well, come a little, further down the
gully. That's better! Now we're safe as the bank, and you'll stop and tell me
something about him, won't you, dear, before you go?"
Before she went! Could she ever go now? All the strength which this poor
creature had imbibed from a man as masterful as the woman was weak—an
imitative courage, never for a moment her honest own—had been rooted up
easily enough from the soul where there was no soil for it, and was now as
though it had never existed. Such nerve as she had summoned up was gone.
Yes, she would stop and talk; that would be a relief. And Missy should hear
all, all there was to tell; but this was very little, incredibly little indeed.
On that first evening, when Missy had come and gone, Arabella had taken
a stroll by herself after supper; had been thinking more about the Family
Cherub story, in which she was then engrossed, than of anything else that she
could now remember; but it appeared her head had been full at the time of
romantic stuff of one kind or another, so that when she came very suddenly
upon a handsome stranger leaning over the slip-rails and smoking his pipe, it
was readily revealed to Arabella that she had been waiting for that moment
and that stranger all her life. She said as much now, in other words, but wasted
time in unnecessary dilatation upon the man's good looks before proceeding
with her confession. He had spoken soft words to her in the soft night air. He
had kissed her across the slip-rails. And Arabella had lived thirty years in her
tiny corner of the world, but never before had she been kissed by the mouth of
man not a Teesdale. Missy might stare as much as she liked; it was the sacred
truth, was that.
So much for the first meeting, which was a pure accident. There had been
others which were nothing of the kind. Missy nodded, as much as to say she
knew all about those other meetings, and hurried Arabella to the point. That
the foolish girl knew less than nothing worth knowing about this man was
only too evident; but it seemed his name was Stanborough. And to-morrow,
said Arabella, with a sudden hauling at the slack of her nerves, this would be
her name too.
Then she still meant to go?
Arabella fell to pieces again. She had promised. He was waiting. He would
kill her if she broke her promise.
"Kill your grandmother!" said Missy. "Let him wait. Shall I tell you who'll
kill who if you do go?"
"Who?" said Arabella in a whisper.
"Why, you'll kill your father, as sure as ever God made you, my girl."
"But we should soon come back—and with money enough to help them
here tremendously! He has promised that; and you don't know how well off he
is, Missy. Yes, yes, we should soon come back after we were married!"
"I dare say—after that," said Missy dryly.
"Then you don't think he—means——"
"Of course he doesn't."
"How do you know?"
"Never mind how I know. It's enough that I do know, as sure as I'm
standing under this tree. You've told me quite sufficient. I feel as if I knew
your man as well as I've known two or three. The brutes! And I tell you,'Bella,
that if you go to him now, as you thought of doing, your life will be blasted
from this night on. He will never marry you. He hasn't gone the right way
about that. No, but he'll ruin you and leave you in your ruin; and when he
does, may the Lord have mercy on your soul!"
She had said. And the extraordinary emotion which had gathered in her
voice as she went on had the effect of taking Arabella out of herself even then.
"Missy," she whispered—"Missy, you are crying! How can you know so
much that is terrible? You seem to know all about it, Missy!"
"Never mind how much I know, or how I came to know it," cried the other.
"I know enough to want to save you from what some girls I've known have
come to. To say nothing of saving your dear old father's life. For kill him it
would."
Arabella had been marvelling; but now her own difficulty clutched her
afresh.
"He will kill me if I don't go to him. He has said so," she moaned in her
misery, "and he will."
"Not he! He's a coward. I feel as if I knew the beast—and precious soon I
shall."
Arabella started. "What do you mean?" said she.
"I mean that you've got to leave your friend to me. I'll soon settle him."
Missy spoke cheerily. Her new tone inspired confidence in the breast of
Arabella, who whispered eagerly, "How can you? Ah, if you only could!"
 "You would like it?"
"I should thank God! O Missy, I have been such a wicked, foolish girl, but
you are so strong and brave! I shall love you for this all my life!"
"Will you? I wonder," said Missy. "But never mind that now. Go you back
to the house, and if I don't come to your room in less than half an hour and tell
you that I've sent Mr. Stanborough about his business——"
"Hush!" exclaimed the other in low alarm. "I hear him now. He is coming
to look for me."
It was a very faint sound, but terror had sharpened the girl's ears. It was the
sound of a walking-stick swishing the dry grass on the further slope of the
gully. Missy heard it also when she bent her ear to listen, and the next moment
she had her companion by the shoulders.
"Now run." said she, "and run for your life. No, we've no time for any of
that stuff now. Time enough to thank me when I come and tell you I've sent
him to the right-about for good and all. Run quickly—keep behind the trees—
and all will be well before you're an hour older."
And so they separated, Arabella hurrying upward to the farm, her heart
drumming against her ribs, while Missy trudged down the hill at her full
height, with a marble mouth, and both fists clenched.

CHAPTER IX.—FACE TO FACE.

For whatever else this wild girl may have been, she was obviously not a
coward. That is the one thing to be said for Missy without any hesitation
whatever. Alone, and in the night, she was going to pit herself against an
unknown man, who was certainly a villain; yet on she went, with her chin in
the air and her arms swinging free. The trees were thickest at the bottom of the
low gully. The girl came through them with a brisk glance right and left, but
never a lagging step. On the further slope the trees spread out again, and here,
on comparatively open ground, she did stop, and suddenly. She could smell
the man's pipe in the sweet night air; the man himself was nowhere to be seen.
Missy filled her lungs slowly through her teeth, and emptied them with
dilated nostrils. Then she went on, longing in her heart for a moon. In the
starlight it was not possible to see clearly very many yards ahead. So far as she
could see—and her eyes were good—there was no one in that paddock but
herself. Yet a faint smell of tobacco still slightly fouled the air. And this was
the very worst part of the whole business; it had brought Missy at last to a
second stand-still, and to the determination of singing out, when, without
warning sound, an arm was flung round her neck, soft words were being
whispered in her ear, and Missy who was no coward felt the veins freezing in
her body.
She flung herself free with a great effort, then reeled against the she-oak
from behind which he had crept who now stood taking off his hat to her in the
starlight.
"I beg your pardon," said a rich, suave voice in its suavest tones; "upon my
word, I beg your pardon from the very bottom of my heart! I thought—I give
you my word I thought you were another young lady altogether!"
Missy had recovered a measure of her customary self-control. "So I see—
so I see," she managed to say distinctly enough; but her voice was the voice of
another person.
"Thank you, indeed! You are very generous," said the man, raising his hat
once more; "few women would have understood. The fact is, as I say, I took
you for a certain young lady whom I quite expected to meet before this.
Perhaps you have seen her, and could tell me where she is? For we have
missed each other among these accursed gum-trees."
The fellow's impudence was good for Missy.
"Yes, I have seen her," said she, as calmly as the other.
"And where may she be at this moment?"
"In her father's house."
The man stood twirling his moustache and showing the white teeth under
it. Then he stuck in his mouth a meerschaum he had in his hand, and sucked
silently at the pipe for some moments. "I beg your pardon once more; but I
fear we are at cross-purposes," said he presently. He had been considering.
"I don't think it," said Missy.
"And why not?" This with a smile.
"Because I have a message for you, Mr. Stan-borough."
"Ha!"
"A message from Arabella Teesdale," said Missy, who had lowered her
tone and drawn the other a pace nearer in his eagerness.
"And?" he asked; but he was made to wait. "Will you have the goodness to
give me that message? Tell me what she says, can't you?"
"Oh, certainly!" replied Missy, with a laugh. "I was to say that she had
been very foolish, but has come to her senses in time; and that you will never
see her any more, as she has thought better of it, and is done with you for good
and all!"
There was a pause first, and then a short sardonic laugh.
"So you were to say all that! It isn't the easiest thing in the world to take it
in all at once. Do you mind saying some of it over again?"
"Once is enough. You've got your warning; it's no good your coming after
'Bella Teesdale no more. If you do, you look out for her brother, that's all!"
"John William, eh?" The man laughed again.
"Yes."
"I know all about the family, you see. I know all about you too—in a way. I
never knew you were 'Bella's keeper, I must admit. She merely told me you
were a young English lady, of the name of Miss Miriam Oliver, who landed
the other week in the Parramatta."
"So I am," said Missy, trembling violently. Her back was still to the good
she-oak, but the man had come so close to her now that she could not have
escaped him if she would.
"Now that's very interesting," he hissed, so that the moisture from his
mouth struck her in the face. "If I'd been asked who you were, d'ye see,
without first being told, d'ye know what I should have said? I should have said
that the other week—just about the time the Parramatta came in—there was a
certain member of the Bijou Chorus, who answered to the name of Ada
Lefroy. And I should have said that Miss Miriam Oliver, of England, was so
exactly the dead-spit of Miss Ada Lefroy, of the Bijou Theatre, Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia, in the Southern Hemisphere, that they must be one and the
same young lady. As it is, I'll strike a light and see." He struck one on the spot.
Missy was staring at him with still eyes in a white face. He laughed softly, and
used the match to relight his meerschaum pipe, which had gone out.
"Well, if this doesn't lick creation!" he murmured, nodding his head very
slowly, to look the girl up and down. "To think that I should have missed you
from the town and found you in the country! The swell young lady from
Home! Good Lord, it's too rich to be true."
Missy opened her lips that had been fast, and under that she-oak her
language would have surprised the Teesdales.
"Come, this is more like," said the other clapping his hands in mock
approval. "Now you'll feel better, eh? And now you'll tell me how you worked
it, I'm sure."
 Missy said what she would do instead.
"Then I must just tell myself. Let's see now: your father—ha! ha!—was old
Teesdale's old friend, and luckily for you he'd warned them his daughter was
something out of the common. That was luck! And you were out of the
common! Hasn't 'Bella told me the things you said and did, till I was sick and
tired? Faith, I'd have listened better if I'd dreamt it was you! I remember her
saying you brought a letter of introduction, however; and that you must have
stole, my beauty!"
Missy cleared her throat. "You're a liar," she said. "I found it."
"You found it! That's a lot better, isn't it? A fat lot! Anyhow, out you came,
to pose as my young lady from Home till further orders. And my oath, it was
one of the cheekiest games I've heard of yet!"
"I only came out for a lark," Missy said sullenly. "It was they that put it
into my head to come back and stay. I couldn't help it. It was better here than
in Melbourne. Much better!"
"Morally, eh?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, this is a cleaner life than t'other—what?"
"It is. Thank God!"
Stanborough laughed. (Missy had known him under another name, but she
was hardly in a position to gain anything by reminding him of that.) "A mighty
fine life," said he, "with a mighty fine lie at the bottom of it!"
"Yes," said Missy slowly, "that's true enough. But I'm a better sort than
when I came here, I know that!"
"A better sort, eh? Ha! ha! ha! That's good, that is. That's very good
indeed."
But the girl was too much in earnest to heed the sneers. "You may laugh as
you like—it's God's truth," cried she. "And Melbourne will never see me no
more, nor London neither. Why? 'Cause when I clear out of this, I clear up-
country; and up-country I shall live ever after; yes, and very likely marry and
die respectable. So you can go on jeering——"
"Stop! Not so fast," said Stanborough. "You seem to have got it all cut and
dried; but when did you think of clearing out of this? Suppose you're safe till
there's been time for the mails home and out again. That takes three months;
you've been here more than one already, and you meant to stop just one month
more. Good! very good indeed. Sorry your one month more has gone so
quickly—sorry it's only one more night instead. However, that's the misfortune
of war. Quite understand? Not another month—another night only—that's to-
night—and a little bit of tomorrow."
Missy remarked at length:
"So you mean to give me away; I might have known that."
"Of course I do. Six months hard, that's what you will get." Missy
shuddered. Her tormentor watched her and continued: "So that makes you sit
up, does it, my dear? She didn't know she was breaking the law, didn't she?
She'll find out soon enough—find out what it costs to pass yourself off as
another person, in this Colony—find out what the inside of Carlton Jail's like,
too! Not go back to town. That was good, that was."
The girl could only pant and glare and wring her hands. More followed in
the same strain.
"Nice night, ain't it? Nice breeze coming up to kiss the leaves and make
'em cry! Hark at 'em, tree after tree. There goes this she-oak over our heads!
Nice and cool on your face, too, isn't it? Nice wholesome smell of eucalyptus
—and all the rest of it. Oh, a sweet night altogether, and one to remember—for
your last night out o' prison!"
"You brute!" said Missy, and worse.
He listened patiently, nodding his head at each name. And then—
"All that? Not so fast, my dear, not half so fast, if you please. You're in far
too much of a hurry, I do assure you. All that's supposing I do give you away."
The man's tone was changed. "But you're going to."
"No," replied Stanborough, "not if you'll clear right out to-night. Do that
and I won't say a word to a soul; not even at the farm will I give you away,
once you're gone. It'll just be a case of your going as mysteriously as you
came; and they may never find out the truth about you; but even if they do,
you'll be far enough before they do. Only clear out to-night!"
"And leave 'Bella to you? I'll see you in blazes——-"
"And yourself in quod———"
"I don't care; you're not going to ruin Arabella."
"What if you're too late to prevent it?"
"If I was, you wouldn't be here to-night. You see I know you, too."
There was a pause.
"Do you know what I've half a mind to do?" Stanborough said at length in
an exceedingly calm voice.
 "Yes; to kill me. But you haven't half the pluck—not you! I know you of
old."
"All right, we shall see. I give you the rest of this night to clear out in. If
you don't, you may lose me my game; but you may bet your soul, Ada Lefroy,
I'll have you locked up before you're a day older."
He shook his fist in her face and went away very abruptly; but in a minute
he was back, all eagerness and soft persuasion.
"I have nothing against you, Ada," he began now. "You and I have had fun
together. And after all, what have I to gain by getting you locked up? What is
it to me if you hoodwink these old people and run your own risk? Why should
I want you to clear out to-night? See here, my girl, I don't want you to do
anything of the kind. You sit tight as long as you think you can; only go back
now, like a sensible sort, and get 'Bella to come along with me, like another."
"I can't."
"You could. It was you who persuaded her not to come. I know it was; so
don't tell me you couldn't persuade her that I am all right, and to keep her word
with me after all."
"Then I won't say I couldn't I'll say I never will."
"And you mean that?"
"Of course I mean it."
"Well knowing that I shall come and expose you to-morrow, or the next
day, or the day after that? By God, it'd be sport to keep you waiting!"
"Then have your sport. Have it! I will never leave 'Bella, that's one thing
sure."
"You'd go to prison for her?"
"I'd do anything for any of them."
"Then go to hell for them!"
With that he lifted his clenched fist and struck at the girl's face, but she put
up her hands, and only her lip was grazed. When she lowered her hands the
man was gone.
And this time he was gone altogether. Missy waited, cowering behind the
tree, now on this side, now on that. But there were no more footsteps in the
short, dry grass until Missy herself stole out from under that she-oak, and crept
down into the gully, with giving knees and her chin on her breast, a very
different figure from the bold adventuress who had marched up that same
slope a short hour earlier in the night. And the stars were still shining all over
the little weather-board homestead, so softly, so peacefully, when Missy got
back to it. And in the verandah was the wooden chair in which she would sit to
read to Mr. Teesdale, and the wooden chair in which Mr. Teesdale would sit
and listen. And Missy glided up and took away their book, which lay forgotten
on one of the chairs; and then she glided back, thinking chiefly of the last
chapter they had read together. They were hardly likely to read another now.
But that was not a nice thought; and the farmhouse lay so still and serene
under the stars, it was good to watch it longer; for the little homestead had
never before seemed half so sweet or so desirable in the girl's eyes. And these
were the only waking eyes just then on the premises, for even Arabella had
fallen into a fitful, feverish sleep, from which, however, she was presently
awakened in the following manner.
Something hot and dry had touched her hand that was lying out over the
coverlet. Something else that was also hot, but not dry, had fallen upon that
hand, and more of the same sort were still falling. So Arabella awoke
frightened; and there was Missy, kneeling at her bedside, fondling her hand,
and sobbing as she prayed aloud. Arabella heard without listening. Days
afterwards she took out of her ears two phrases: "whatever I have been" and
"bad as I am". These words she put in due season through the mills of her
mind; but at the time she simply said:
"Missy! What are you doing? Ah, I remember. Have you seen him? Tell
me what he said—what has happened—and what is going to happen now."
"I've seen him and settled him," Missy whispered firmly as she dried her
eyes. "What he said isn't of any account. But nothing's going to happen—
nothing—nothing at all."

CHAPTER X.—THE THINNING OF THE ICE.

Old Teesdale sat with his arm-chair drawn close to the table, and his shirt-
sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He was writing a letter in which he had already
remarked that it was the hottest Christmas Eve within even his experience of
that colony. In the verandah, indeed, the thermometer had made the shade heat
upwards of 100° since nine o'clock in the morning, touching 110° in the early
afternoon. It was now about six (Mr. Teesdale being still without his watch
was never positive of the time), and because of Mrs. T.'s theory that to open a
window was to let in the heat, to say nothing of the flies, the atmosphere of the
parlour with its reminiscences of the day's meals was sufficiently unendurable.
A little smoke from Mr. Teesdale's pipe would surely have improved it if
anything; but that was against the rules of the house, and the poor gentleman,
who was not master of it, wrote on and on with the perspiration standing on
his bald head, and the reek of the recent tea in his nose.
He was on the third leaf of a letter for the English mail. "As to Miriam
herself"—thus the paragraph began which was still being penned—"I can only
say that she is the life and soul of our quiet home, and what we shall do
without her when she goes I really do not like to think. Referring again to the
letter in which you advised me of her arrival, and to those 'habits and ways' of
which you warned me, I cannot deny that I soon saw what you meant; but I
must say that I would not have Miriam without her 'mannerisms' even if I
could. They may be modern, but they are very entertaining indeed to us, who
are so far behind the times. Yes, the young girls of our day may have talked
less 'slang' and paid more attention to 'appearances,' but no girl ever had a
warmer heart than your Miriam, nor a kinder nature, nor a franker way with
her in all her dealings. But her kindness is what has struck me most, from the
very first, and especially her kindness to an old man like me. You should see
her sit and read to me by the hour, and help me with whatever little thing I
may happen to be doing, and listen to my talk as though I were a young man
like our John William. Then I think you would understand why I am always
saying that she never could have been anybody's daughter but yours, and why
I want to keep her as long as ever you will let her stay. She has spoken of
going on to other friends after the New Year; but I wish you would insist upon
her coming back to us for a real long visit before she leaves the colony for
good; and I know that you would do so if you could but see the change which
even a few weeks with us has already wrought in her. You must know, my dear
Oliver, that we live here very simply indeed; but I am of opinion that simple
living and early hours were what Miriam needed more than anything else, for
it is no exaggeration to say that she does not look the same girl who first came
to see us with your letter of introduction. She has a better colour, her whole
face is brighter and healthier, and the tired look I at first noticed in her eyes
has gone out of them once and——"
At this point Mr. Teesdale paused, pen in air.
He was a very careful letter-writer, who wrote a beautiful old-fashioned
hand, and made provision for perfectly even spaces by means of a black-lined
sheet nicely adjusted under the leaf; and he rounded each sentence in his own
mind before neatly committing it to paper. Thus a single erasure was a great
rarity in his letters, while two would have made him entirely rewrite. On the
other hand, many a minute here and there were spent in peering through the
gun-room window, and scouring the Dandinong Ranges for the right word;
and now several minutes went thus in one lump, because Mr. Teesdale was by
nature an even greater stickler for the literal truth than for flawless
penmanship, and he had caught himself in the act of writing what was not
strictly true. It was a fact that the tired look had gone out of Missy's eyes, but
to add "once and for all" was to make the whole statement a lie, according to
Mr. Teesdale's standard. For the last thirty-six hours that tired look had been
back in those bright eyes, which brightened now but by fits and starts. David
did not so define it, but the girl looked hunted. He merely knew that she did
not look to-day or yesterday as she had looked for some weeks without a
break, therefore he could not and would not say that she did. Accordingly the
predicate of the unfinished sentence was radically altered until that sentence
stood... "and the tired look I at first noticed in her eyes is to be seen in them
but very seldom now."
But the erasure had occurred on the fifth page, on a new sheet altogether,
which it was certainly worth while to commence afresh; and old Tees-dale had
scarcely regained the point at which he had tripped when the door opened, and
the subject of his letter was herself in the room beside him, looking swiftly
about her, as if to make certain that he was alone, before allowing her eyes to
settle upon his welcoming smile.
"Well, Missy, and what have you been doing with yourself since tea?"
"I?" said the girl absently, as she glanced into the gun-room, and then out
of each window, very keenly, before sitting down on the sofa. "I? Oh, I've
been having a sleep, that's what I've been doing."
Mr. Teesdale was watching her narrowly as he leant back in his chair. She
did not look to him as though she had been sleeping; but that was of course his
own fancy. On the other hand, the strange expression in Missy's eyes, which
he could not quite define, struck the old man as stranger and more conspicuous
than ever.
"I'm afraid, my dear, that you haven't been getting your proper sleep
lately."
"You're right. There's no peace for the wicked these red-hot nights, let
alone the extra wicked, like me."
"Get away with you!" said old Teesdale, laughing at the grave girl who was
staring him in the face without the glimmer of a smile.
"Get away I will, one of these days; and glad enough you'll be when that
day comes and you know all about me. I've always told you a day like that
would come sooner or later. It might come to-morrow—it might come to-
night!"
"Missy, my dear, I do wish you'd smile and show me you're only joking.
Not that it's one of your best jokes, my dear, nor one of your newest either. Ah,
that's it—that's better!"
 She had jumped up to look once more out of the window: a man was
passing towards the hen-yard, it was little Geordie, and Missy sat down
smiling.
"Then tell me what it is you're busy with," she began in a different tone; an
attempt at the old saucy manner which the farmer loved as a special, sacred
perquisite of his own.
"Now you're yourself again! I'm writing a long, long letter, Missy. Guess
who to?"
"To—to Mr. Oliver?"
"Mr. Oliver! Your father, my dear—your own father! Now guess what it's
about, if you can!"
"About—me?"
David nodded his head with great humour.
"Yes, it's about you. A nice character I'm giving you, you may depend!"
"Are you saying that I'm a regular bad lot then?"
"Ah, that's telling!"
"If you were, you wouldn't be far from the mark, if you only knew it. But
let's hear what you have said."
"Nay, come! You don't expect me to let you hear what I've said about you,
do you, Missy?"
"Of course I do," said Missy firmly.
"But that would be queer! Nay, Missy, I couldn't show you this letter, I
really couldn't. For one thing, it would either make you conceited or else very
indignant with poor me!"
"So that's the kind of character you've been giving me, is it?" said Missy,
smiling grimly. "Now I must see it."
"Nay, come, I don't think you must, Missy—I don't think you must!"
"But I want to."
So exclaiming, the girl rose resolutely to her feet; and her resolution settled
the matter; for it will have been seen that the weak old man himself was all the
time wishing her to see what he had written about her. After all, why should
she not know how fond he was of her? If it made her ever such a little bit
fonder of him, well, there surely could be no harm in that. Still, Mr. Tees-dale
chose to walk up and down the room while Missy stood at the window to read
his letter, for it was now growing dark.
 "I see you mention that twenty pounds." Missy had looked up suddenly
from the letter. "How was it you managed to get the money that night, after
all? I have often meant to ask you."
Mr. Teesdale stopped in his walk. "What does it matter how I got them,
honey? I neither begged, borrowed nor stole 'em, if that's what you want to
know." The old gentleman laughed.
"I want to know lots more than that, because it matters a very great deal,
when I went and put you to all that inconvenience."
"Well, I went to the man who buys all our milk. I told you I was going to
him, didn't I?"
"Yes, but I've heard you say here at table that you haven't had a farthing
from him these six months."
"Missy, my dear," remonstrated the old man, with difficulty smiling, "you
will force me to ask you—to mind——"
"My own business? Right you are. What's the time?"
"The time!" The question did indeed seem irrelevant. "I'm sure I don't
know, but I'll go and have a look at the kitchen——"
"Then you needn't. I don't really want to know. I was only wondering when
John William would be back from Melbourne. But where's your watch?"
"Getting put to rights, my dear," said old Tees-dale faintly, with his eyes
upon the carpet.
"What, still?"
"Yes; they're keeping it a long time, aren't they?"
"They are so," said Missy dryly. She watched the old man as he crossed the
room twice, with his weak-kneed steps, his white hands joined behind him and
his thin body bent forward. Then she went on reading his letter.
It affected her curiously. At the third page she uttered a quick exclamation;
at the fourth she lowered the letter with a quick gesture, and stood staring at
David with an expression at which he could only guess, because the back of
her head was against the glass.
"This is too much," cried Missy in a broken voice. "I can never let you
send this."
"And why not, my dear?" laughed Mr. Teesdale, echoing, as he thought,
her merriment; for it was to this he actually attributed the break in her voice.
"Because there isn't a word of truth in it; because I haven't a warm heart
nor a kind nature, and because I'm not frank in my dealings. Frank, indeed! If
you knew what I really was, you wouldn't say that in a hurry!"
Mr. Teesdale could no longer suppose that the girl was in fun. Her bosom
was heaving with excitement; he could see that, if he could not see her face.
He said wearily:
"There you go again, Missy! I can't understand why you keep saying such
silly things."
"I'm not what you think me. You understand that, don't you?"
"I hear what you say, but I don't believe a word of it."
"Then you must! You shall! I can't bear to deceive you a moment longer—I
simply can't bear it when you speak and think of me like this. First of all, then,
this letter's no good at all!"
In another instant that letter fluttered upon the floor in many pieces.
"You must forgive me," said Missy, "I couldn't help it; it wasn't worth the
paper it was written on; and now I'm going to tell you why."
Old Teesdale, however, had never spoken, and this silenced the girl also,
for the moment. But that moment meant a million. One more, and Missy
would have confessed everything. She was worked up to it. She was in
continual terror of an immediate exposure. Her better nature was touched and
cauterised with shame for the sweet affection of which she had cheated this
simple old man. She would tell him everything now and here, and the mercy
that filled his heart would be extended to her because she had not waited to be
unmasked by another. But she paused to measure him with her eye, or,
perhaps, to take a last look at him looking kindly upon her. And in that pause
the door opened, making Missy jump with fright; and when it was only
Arabella who entered with the lighted kerosene lamp, Missy's eyes sped back
to the old man's face in time to catch a sorrowful mute reproach that went
straight to her palpitating heart. She stooped without a word to help him gather
up the fragments of the torn letter.
She had no further opportunity of speaking that night; and supper would
have been a silent meal but for what happened as they all sat at table. All, that
night, did not include John William, who was evidently spending Christmas
Eve in Melbourne. There was some little talk about him. David remarked that
a mail would be in with the Christmas letters, and Missy was asked whether
she had not told John William to call at the post office. She had not. During
her sojourn at the farm she had only once been to the post office herself; had
never sent; and had been told repeatedly she was not half anxious enough
about her Home letters. They told her so now. Missy generally said it was
because she was so happy and at-home with them; but tonight she made no
reply; and this was where they were when there came that knock at the
window which made Missy spill her cocoa and otherwise display a strange
state of mind.
"Who is it?" she cried. "Who do you think it is?"
"Maybe some neighbour," said Mrs. T., "to wish us the compliments o' t'
season."
"If not old Father Christmas himself!" laughed David to Missy, in the wish
that she should forgive herself, as he had forgiven her, for tearing up his letter.
But Missy could only stare at the window-blind, behind which the knock had
been repeated, and she was trembling very visibly indeed. Then the front-door
opened, and it was Missy, not one of the family, that rushed out into the
passage to see who it was. The family heard her shouting for joy:
"It's John William. It's only John William after all. Oh, you dear, dear old
Jack!"
Very quickly she was back in the room, and down on the horsehair sofa,
breathing heavily. John William followed in his town clothes.
"Yes, of course it's me. Good evening, all. Who did you think it was,
Missy?"
"I thought it was visitors. What if it had been? Oh, I hate visitors, that's
all."
"Then I'm sorry to hear it," remarked Mrs. Teesdale sourly, "for we have
visitors coming to-morrow."
"I hate 'em, too," said John William wilfully.
"Then I'll thank you to keep your hates to yourselves," cried Mrs. T. "It's
very rude of you both. Your mother wouldn't have spoke so, Missy!"
"Wouldn't she!" laughed the girl. "I wonder if you know much about my
mother? But after that I think I'll be off to bed. I am rude, I know I am, but I
never pretended to be anything else."
This was fired back at them from the door, and then Missy was gone
without saying good-night.
"She's not like her mother," said Mrs. T. angrily; "no, that she isn't!"
"But why in the name of fortune go and tell her so?" John William blurted
out. "I never knew anything like you, mother; on Christmas Eve, too!"
"I think," said David gently, "that Missy is not quite herself. She has been
very excitable all day, and I think it would have been better to have taken no
notice of what she said. You should remember, my dear, that she is utterly
unused to our climate, and that even to us these last few days have been very
trying."
Arabella was the only one who had nothing at all to say, either for Missy or
against her. But she went to Missy's room a little later, and there she spoke out:
"You thought it was—Stanborough! I saw you did."
"Then I did—for the moment. But it was very silly of me—I don't know
what could have put him into my head, when I've settled him so finely for
good and all!"
"God bless you, Missy! But—but do you think there is any fear of him
coming back and walking right in like that?"
"Not the least. Still, if he did—if he did, mark you—I'd tackle him again as
soon as look at him. So never you fear, my girl, you leave him to me."

CHAPTER XI.—A CHRISTMAS OFFERING.

In the Melbourne shops that Christmas Eve the younger Teesdale had been
perpetrating untold acts of extravagance, for two of which a certain very bad
character was entirely and solely responsible. Thus with next day's Christmas
dinner there was a bottle of champagne, and the healths of Mr. and Mrs.
Oliver, and of Miriam their daughter, were drunk successively, and with
separate honours. Missy thereat seemed to suffer somewhat from her private
feelings, as indeed she did suffer, but those feelings were not exactly what
they were suspected to be at the time. She was wondering how much longer
she could keep up this criminal pretence and act this infamous part. And as she
wondered, a delirious recklessness overcame her, and emptying her glass she
jumped to her feet to confess to them all then and there; but the astonished eye
of Mrs. Teesdale went like cold steel to her heart, and she wished them long
life and prosperity instead. She found herself seated once more with a
hammering heart and sensations that drove her to stare hard at the old woman's
unsympathetic face, as her own one chance of remaining cool till the end of
the meal. And yet a worse moment was to follow hard upon the last.
Missy had made straight for the nearest and the thickest shelter, which
happened to underlie that dark jagged rim of river-timber at which old
Teesdale was so fond of gazing. She had thrown herself face downward on a
bank beside the sluggish brown stream; her fingers were interwoven under her
face, her thumbs stuck deep into her ears. So she did not hear the footsteps
until they were close beside her, when she sat up suddenly with a face of blank
terror.
It was only John William. "Who did you think it was?" said he, smiling as
he sat down beside her.
Missy was trembling dreadfully. "How was I to know?" she answered
nervously. "It might have been a bushranger, mightn't it?"
"Well, hardly," replied John William, as seriously as though the question
had been put in the best of good faith. And it now became obvious that he also
had something on his mind and nerves, for he shifted a little further away from
Missy, and sat frowning at the dry brown grass, and picking at it with his
fingers.
"Anyhow, you startled me," said Missy, as she arranged the carroty fringe
that had been shamefully dishevelled a moment before. "I am very easily
startled, you see."
"I am very sorry. I do apologise, I'm sure! And I'll go away again this
minute, Missy, if you like." He got to his knees with the words, which were
spoken in a more serious tone than ever.
"Oh, no, don't go away. I was only moping. I am glad you've come."
"Thank you, Missy."
"But now you have come, you've got to talk and cheer me up. See? There's
too many things to think about on a Christmas Day—when—when you're so
far away from everybody."
John William agreed and sympathised. "The fact is I had something to
show you," he added; "that's why I came."
"Then show away," said Missy, forcing a smile. "Something in a cardboard
box, eh?"
"Yes. Will you open it and tell me how you like it?" He handed her the box
that he had taken out of his breast-pocket. Missy opened it and produced a
very yellow bauble of sufficiently ornate design.
"Well, I'm sure! A bangle!"
"Yes; but what do you think of it?" asked John William anxiously. He had
also blushed very brown.
"Oh, of course I think it's beautiful—beautiful!" exclaimed Missy, with
unmistakable sincerity. "But who's it for? That's what I want to know," she
added, as she scanned him narrowly.
"Can't you guess?"
 "Well, let's see. Yes—you're blushing! It's for your young woman, that's
evident."
John William edged nearer.
"It's for the young lady—the young lady I should like to be mine—only I'm
so far below her," he began in a murmur. Then he looked at her hard. "Missy,
for God's sake forgive me," he cried out, "but it's for you!"
"Nonsense!"
"But I mean it. I got it last night. Do, please, have it."
"No," said Missy firmly. "Thank you ever so very awfully much; but you
must take it back." And she held it out to him with a still hand.
"I can't take it back—I won't!" cried young Teesdale excitedly. "Consider it
only as a Christmas box—surely your father's godson may give you a little bit
of a Christmas box? That's me, Missy, and anything else I've gone and said
you must forgive and forget too, for it was all a slip. I didn't mean to say it,
Missy, I didn't indeed. I hope I know my position better than that. But this here
little trumpery what-you-call-it, you must accept it as a Christmas present
from us all. Yes, that's what you must do; for I'm bothered if I take it back."
"You must," repeated Missy very calmly. "I think you mean to break my
heart between you with your kindness. Here's the box and here's the bangle."
John William looked once and for all into the resolute light eyes. Then first
he took the box and put the lid on it, and stowed it away in his breastpocket;
and after that he took that gold bangle, very gingerly, between finger and
thumb, and spun it out into the centre of the brown river, where it made bigger,
widening bangles, that took the best part of a minute to fail and die away.
Then everything was stiller than before; and stillest of all were the man and
the woman who stood facing each other on the bank, speckled with the steep
sunlight that came down on them like rain through the leaves of the river-
timber overhead.
"That was bad," said Missy at last. "Something else was worse. It's not
much good your trying to hedge matters with me; and for my part I'm going to
speak straight and plain for once. If I thought that you'd gone and fallen in
love with me—as sure as we're standing here, Jack, I'd put myself where
you've put that bangle."
Her hand pointed to the place. There was neither tremor in the one nor
ripple upon the other.
"But why?" Teesdale could only gasp.
"Because I'm so far below you."
 "Missy! Missy!" he was beginning passionately, but she checked him at
once.
"Let well alone, Jack. I've spoken God's truth. I'm not going to say any
more; only when you know all about me—as you may any day now—perhaps
even to-day—don't say that I told nothing but lies. That's all. Now must I go
back to the house, or will you?"
He glanced towards the river with unconscious significance. She shook her
head and smiled. He hung his, and went away.
Once more Missy was alone among the river-timber; once more she flung
herself down upon the short, dry grass, but this time upon her back, while her
eyes and her ears were wide open.
A cherry-picker was frivolling in the branches immediately above her.
From the moment it caught her eye, Missy seemed to take great interest in that
cherry-picker's proceedings. She had wasted innumerable cartridges on these
small birds, but that was in her blood-thirsty days, now of ancient history, and
there had never been any ill-feeling between Missy and the cherry-pickers
even then. One solitary native cat was all the fair game that she had
slaughtered in her time. She now took to wondering why it was that these
animals were never to be seen upon a tree in day-time; and as she wondered,
her eyes hunted all visible forks and boughs; and as she hunted, a flock of
small parrots came whirring like a flight of arrows, and called upon Missy's
cherry-picker, and drove him from the branches overhead. But the parrots
were a new interest, and well worth watching. They had red beaks and redder
heads and tartan wings and emerald breasts. Missy had had shots at these also
formerly; even now she shut her left eye and pretended that her right fore-
finger was a gun, and felt certain of three fine fellows with one barrel had it
really been a gun. Then at last she turned on her elbow towards the river, and
opened her mouth to talk to herself. And after a long half-hour with nature this
was all she had to say:
"If I did put myself in there, what use would it be? That beast would get a
hold of Arabella then. But it'd be nice never to know what they said when they
found out everything. What's more, I'd rather be in there, after this, than in any
town. After this!"
She gave that mob of chattering parrots a very affectionate glance; also the
dark green leaves with the dark blue sky behind them; also the brown, still
river, hidden away from the sun. She had come to love them all, and the river
would be a very good place for her indeed.
She muttered on: "Then to think of John William! Well, I never! It would
be best for him too if I snuffed out, one way or another; and as for 'Bella, if
that brute doesn't turn up soon, he may not turn up at all. But he said he'd keep
me waiting. He's low enough down to do it, too."
She looked behind her shuddering, as she had looked behind her many and
many a time during the last few days. Instantly her eyes fell upon that at which
one has a right to shudder. Within six feet of Missy a brown snake had
stiffened itself from the ground with darting tongue and eyes like holes in a
head full of fire. And Missy began to smile and hold out her hands to it.
"Come on," she said. "Come on and do your worst! I wish you would.
That'd be a way out without no blame to anybody—and just now they might
be sorry. Come on, or I'll come to you. Ah, you wretch, you blooming coward,
you!"
She had got to her knees, and was actually making for the snake on all
fours; but it darted back into its hole like a streak of live seaweed; and Missy
then rose wearily to her feet, and stood looking around her once more, as
though for the last time.
"What am I to do?" she asked of river, trees, and sky. "What am I to do? I
haven't the pluck to finish myself, nor yet to make a clean breast. I haven't any
pluck at all. I might go back and do something that'd make the whole kit of
'em glad to get rid o' me. That's what I call a gaudy idea, but it would mean
clearing out in a hurry. And I don't want to clear out—not yet. Not just yet! So
I'll slope back and see what's happening and how things are panning out; and
I'll go on sitting tight as long as I'm let."

CHAPTER XII.—"THE SONG OF MIRIAM."

Accordingly Missy reappeared in the verandah about tea-time, and in the

verandah she was once more paralysed with the special terror that was hanging
over her from hour to hour in these days. An unfamiliar black coat had its back
to the parlour window; it was only when Missy discerned an equally
unfamiliar red face at the other side of the table that she remembered that
Christmas visitors had been expected in the afternoon, and reflected that these
must be they. The invited guests were a brace of ministers connected with the
chapel attended by the Teesdales, and the red face, which was also very fat,
and roofed over with a thatch of very white hair, rose out of as black a coat as
that other of which Missy had seen the back. So these were clearly the
ministers. And they were already at tea.
As soon as Missy entered the parlour she recognised the person sitting with
his back to the window. He had lantern jaws hung with black whiskers, and a
very long but not so very cleanshaven upper lip. His name was Appleton, he
was the local minister, and Missy had not only been taken to hear him preach,
but she had met him personally, and made an impression, judging by the
length of time the ministers hand had rested upon her shoulder on that
occasion. He greeted her now in a very complimentary manner, and with many
seasonable wishes, which received the echo of an echo from the elder reverend
visitor, whom Mrs. Teesdale made known to Missy as their old friend Mr.
Crowdy.
"Mr. Crowdy," added Mrs. T., reproachfully, "came all the way from
Williamtown to preach our Christmas morning sermon. It was a beautiful
sermon, if ever I heard one."
"It was that," put in David, wagging his kind old head. "But you should
have told Mr. Crowdy, my dear, how Miriam feels our heat. I wouldn't let her
go this morning, Mr. Crowdy, on that account. So you see it's me that's to
blame."
Mr. Crowdy looked very sorry for Miriam, but very well pleased with
himself and the world. Missy was shooting glances of gratitude at her
indefatigable old champion. Mr. Crowdy began to eye her kindly out of his fat
red face.
"So your name's Miriam? A good old-fashioned Biblical name, is Miriam,"
he said, in a wheezy, plethoric voice. "Singular thing, too, my name's Aaron;
but I'd make an oldish brother for you, young lady, hey?"
Miriam laughed without understanding, and showed this. So Mr. Teesdale
explained.
"Miriam, my dear, was the sister of Moses and Aaron, you remember."
Missy did remember.
"Moses and Aaron? Why, of course!" cried she. "'Says Moses to Aaron! '"
The quotation was not meant to go any further; but the white-haired
minister asked blandly, "Well, what did he say?" So bland, indeed, was the
question that Missy hummed forth after a very trifling hesitation—
"Says Moses to Aaron,
While talking of these times'—
Says Aaron to Moses,
'I vote we make some rhymes!
The ways of this wicked world,
'Tis not a bed of roses—
 No better than it ought to be—'
'Right you are!' says Moses."
There was a short but perfect silence, during which Mrs. Teesdale glared at
Missy and her husband looked pained. Then the old minister simply remarked
that he saw no fun in profanity, and John William (who was visibly out of his
element) felt frightfully inclined to punch Mr. Crowdy's white head for him.
But the Reverend Mr. Appleton took a lighter view of the matter.
"With all due deference to our dear old friend," said this gentleman, with
characteristic unction, "I must say that I am of opinion 'e is labouring under a
slight misconception. Miss Miriam, I feel sure, was not alluding to any
Biblical characters at all, but to two typical types of the latter-day Levite. Miss
Miriam nods! I knew that I was right!"
"Then I was wrong," said Mr. Crowdy, cheerfully, as he nodded to Missy,
who had not seriously aggrieved him; "and all's well that ends well."
"Hear, hear!" chimed in David, thankfully. "Mrs. T., Mr. Appleton's cup's
off. And Mr. Crowdy hasn't got any jam. Or will you try our Christmas cake
now, Mr. Crowdy? My dears, my dears, you're treating our guests very
shabbily!"
"Some of them puts people about so—some that ought to know better,"
muttered Mrs. Tees-dale under her breath; but after that the tea closed over
Missy's latest misdemeanour—if indeed it was one for Missy—and a slightly
sticky meal went as smoothly as could be expected to its end.
Then Mr. Appleton said grace, and Mr. Crowdy, pushing back his plate and
his chair, exclaimed in an oracular wheeze, "The Hundred!"
"The Old 'Undredth," explained the other, getting on his feet and producing
a tuning-fork. He was the musical minister, Mr. Appleton. Nevertheless, he led
them off too high or too low, and started them afresh three times, before they
were all standing round that tea-table and singing in unison at the rate of about
two lines per minute—
"All—peo—ple—that—on—earth-do—dwell—
Sing—to—the—Lord—with—cheer-fill-voice-
Him—serve—with—fear—His—praise-forth-tell-
Come—ye—be—fore—Him—and—-re-joice."
And so through the five verses, which between them occupied the better
part of ten minutes; whereafter Mr. Crowdy knelt them all down with their
elbows among the tea-things, and offered up a prayer.
 Now it is noteworthy that the black sheep of this mob, that had no business
to be in this mob at all, displayed no sort of inclination to smile at these grave
proceedings. They took Missy completely by surprise; but they failed to tickle
her sense of humour, because there was too much upon the conscience which
had recently been born again to Missy's soul. On the contrary, the hymn
touched her heart and the prayer made it bleed; for that heart was become like
a foul thing cleaned in the pure atmosphere of this peaceful homestead. The
prayer was very long and did not justify its length. It comprised no point, no
sentence, which in itself could have stung a sinner to the quick. But through
her fingers Missy could see the bald pate, the drooping eyelids, and the
reverent, submissive expression of old Mr. Teesdale. And they drew the blood.
The girl rose from her knees with one thing tight in her mind. This was the
fixed determination to undeceive that trustful nature without further delay than
was necessary, and in the first fashion which offered.
A sort of chance came almost immediately; it was not the best sort, but
Missy had grown so desperate that now she was all for running up her true
piratical colours and then sheering off before a gun could be brought to bear
upon her. So she seized the opportunity which occurred in the best parlour, to
which the party adjourned after tea. The best parlour was very seldom used. It
had the fusty smell of all best parlours, which never are for common use, and
was otherwise too much of a museum of albums, antimacassars, ornaments
and footstools, to be a very human habitation at its best. Though all that met
the eye looked clean, there was a strong pervading sense of the dust of
decades; but some of this was about to be raised.
In the passage Mr. Appleton had taken Missy most affectionately by the
arm, and had whispered of Mr. Crowdy, who was ahead, "A grand old man,
and ripe for 'eaven!" But as they entered the best parlour he was
complimenting Missy upon her voice, which had quite altered the sound of the
late hymn from the moment when John William fetched and handed to her an
open hymn-book. And here Mr. Crowdy, seating himself in the least
uncomfortable of the antimacassared chairs, had his say also.
"I like your voice too," the florid old minister observed, cocking a fat eye
at Miriam. "But it is only natural that any young lady of your name should be
musical. Surely you remember? 'And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of
Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with
timbrels and with dances—' and so forth. Exodus fifteenth. I suppose you can't
play upon the timbrel, hey, Miss Miriam?"
"No," said Missy; "but I can dance."
"Hum! And sing? What I mean is, young lady, do you only sing hymns?"
Missy kept her countenance.
 "I have sung songs as well," she ventured to assert.
"Then give us one now, Missy," cried old Tees-dale. "That's what Mr.
Crowdy wants, and so do we all."
"Something lively?" suggested Missy, looking doubtfully at the red-faced
minister.
"Lively? To be sure," replied Mr. Crowdy. "Christmas Day, young lady, is
not like a Sunday unless it happens to fall on one, which I'm glad it hasn't this
year. Make it as lively as convenient. I like to be livened up!" And the old man
rubbed his podgy hands and leant forward in the least uncomfortable chair.
"And shall I give you a dance too?"
"A dance, by all means, if you dance alone. I understand that such dancing
has become quite the rage in the drawing-rooms at home. And a very good
thing too, if it puts a stop to that dancing two together, which is an
abomination in the sight of the Lord. But a dance by yourself—by all manner
of means!" cried Mr. Crowdy, snatching off his spectacles and breathing upon
the lenses.
"But I should require an accompaniment."
"Nothing easier. My friend Appleton can accompany anything that is
hummed over to him twice. Can't you, Appleton?"
"Mr. Crowdy," replied the younger man, in an injured voice, as he looked
askance at a little old piano with its back to the wall, and still more hopelessly
at a music-stool from which it would be perfectly impossible to see the
performance; "Mr. Crowdy, I do call this unfair! I—I——"
"You—you—I know you, sir!" cried the aged divine, with unmerciful
good-humour. "Haven't I heard you do as much at your own teas? Get up at
once, sir, and don't shame our cloth by disobliging a young lady who is
offering to sing to us in the latest style from England!"
"I'm not offering, mind!" said Missy a little sharply. "Still, I'm on to do my
best. Come over here, Mr. Appleton, and I'll hum it quite quietly in your ear. It
goes something like this."
That conquered Appleton; but the Teesdales, while leaving the whole
matter in the hands of Missy and of the venerable Mr. Crowdy, who wanted to
hear her sing, had thrown in words here and there in favour of the performance
and of Mr. Appleton's part in it; all except Mrs. T., who was determined to
have no voice in a matter of which she hoped to disapprove, and who showed
her determination by an even more unsympathetic cast of countenance than
was usual with her wherever Missy was concerned. Mrs. T. was seated upon a
hard sofa by her husband's side, Arabella on a low footstool, John William by
the window, and the two ministers we know where. The one at the piano
seemed to have got his teeth into a banjo accompaniment which would have
sounded very wonderfully like a banjo on that little old tin-pot piano if he had
thumped not quite so hard; but now Missy was posing in front of the
mantelpiece, and all eyes but the unlucky accompanist's were covering her
eagerly.
"Now you're all right, Mr. Appleton. You keep on like that, and I'll nip in
when I'm ready. If I stop and do a spout between the verses you can stop too,
only don't forget to weigh in with the chorus. But when I dance, you keep on.
See? That'll be all right, then. Ahem!"
Missy had spoken behind her hand in a stage whisper; now she turned to
her audience and struck an attitude that made them stare. The smile upon her
face opened their eyes still wider—it was so brazen, so insinuating, and yet so
terribly artificial. And with that smile she began to dance, very slowly and
rhythmically, plucking at her dress and showing her ankles, while Appleton
thumped carefully on, little knowing what he was missing. And when it
seemed as though no song was coming the song began.
But the dance went on through all, being highly appropriate, at all events to
verse one, which ran:—
"Yuss! A fling and a slide with a pal, inside,
It isn't 'alf bad—but mind you!
The spot for a 'op is in front o' the shop
With a fried-fish-breeze be'ind you...
Well! Every lass was bold as brass,
But divvle a one a Venus;
An' Rorty 'Arry as I'm to marry
The only man between us!"
Here Missy and the music stopped together, Mr. Appleton holding his
fingers in readiness over the next notes, while Missy interrupted her dance,
too, to step forward and open fire upon her audience in the following prose:—
"Now that's just 'ow the 'ole thing 'appened. They wouldn't give my pore
'Arry no peace—catch them! Well, 'Arry'e done 's level—I will say that for
'im. 'E took on three at once; but 'is legs wouldn't go round fast enough, an' 'is
arms wouldn't go round at all—catch them! Now would you believe it? When
'e's 'ad enough o' the others—a nasty common low lot they was, too—'e 'as the
cheek to come to yours truly. But—catch me! 'No, 'Arry,' I sez, 'ere's 2d. to go
and 'ave a pint o' four-'alf,' I sez, 'w'ich you must need it,' I sez—just like that.
So 'e goes an' 'as 'alf a dozen. That's my 'Arry all over, that is! An' w'en 'e
come back 'e 'as the impidence to ax me again. But I give 'im a look like this,"
cried Missy, leering horribly at the venerable Crowdy. "Such a look! Just like
that"—with a repetition of the leer for Mrs. Teesdale's special benefit—"'cause
I seen what was wrong with 'im in the twinkling of a dress-improver. An' after
that—chorus-up, Mr. Appleton!—why, after that—
"'Arry 'e 'ad the 'ump,
An' I lets 'im know it—plump
'E swore 'e'd not,
So 'e got it 'ot,
I caught 'im a good ole crump.
You should 'a' seen 'im jump!
I didn't give a dump!
For I yells to 'is pals
'Now look at 'im, gals—
Arry, 'e 'as the 'ump!'"
The dancing had been taken up again with the chorus. There was some
dancing plain at the end of it. Then came verse two:—
"'E swore and cussed till you thought 'e'd bust,
W'ich' is 'abit is when drinky;
'E cussed and swore till 'is mouth was sore
An' the street was painted pinky.
So I sez, sez I, to a stander-by
As was standin' by to listen,
'We've 'ad quite enough o' the reg'lar rough,
An' a bit too much o' this 'un!'"
"'Yuss,'" continued Missy without a break, "'an' if you're a man,' I sez,
'come an' 'elp shift this 'ere bloomin' imitition,' I sez. 'Right you are,' 'e sez,
'since you put it so flatterin' like. An' wot do they call you, my dear,' sez 'e.
'That's my bloomin' business,' sez I, 'wot's yours on the charge-sheet?' 'Ted,'
sez 'e. 'Right,' sez I. 'You git a holt of 'is 'eels, Ted, an' I'll 'ang on to 'is 'air!'"
Up to this point matters had proceeded without audible let or hindrance.
But it appeared that at the psychological moment now reached by the narrator
the prostrate hero had regained the command of his tongue, and the use he
made of it was represented by Missy in so voluble and violent a harangue,
couched in such exceedingly strong language, and all hurled so pointedly at
the heads of Mr. and Mrs. Teesdale on the sofa opposite the fire-place, that an
inevitable interruption now occurred.
"It's quite disgusting! I won't allow such language in my house. Stop at
once!" cried Mrs. T. half rising; but Missy's voice was louder; while old David
stretched an arm in front of his wife and fenced her to the sofa.
"Sit still, my dear, and don't be foolish," said he, quite firmly. "Can't you
see that it's part of the song, and only in fun?"
"Only in fun!" echoed Missy, whose speaking voice had risen to a hoarse
scream. "Ho, yuss, an' I s'pose it was fun between 'Arry an' me an' Ted? You
bet your bags it wasn't! Why, time we'd done with 'im, Ted's rigging was gone
to glory—all but 'is chest-protector. And as for me, you couldn't ha' made a
decent pen-wiper out o' my 'ole attire. An' why? Why 'cause—now then, you
at the pianner!—'cause—
"'Arry' e' ad the 'ump—
The liquorin' lushin' lump—
So I sez to Ted,
"Ere, sit on 'is 'ead,
Or shove 'im under the pump!'
Ted 'e turns out a trump.
We done it with bump an' thump.
For that 'orrible 'Arry
Was 'eavy to carry—
An' 'Arry 'e 'ad 'ump!"
Now not one of them guessed that this was the end of the song. They had
made up their minds to more and worse, and they got it in Missy's final dance.
She was wearing a dark blue skirt of some thin material. Already there had
been glimpses of a white underskirt and a pair of crimson ankles, but now
there were further and fuller views. John William and Arabella had been
curiously and painfully fascinated from the beginning. Their father was still
barring their mother to the sofa with an outstretched arm. The poor old
minister sat forward in his chair with his eyes protruding from his head. His
junior, who was still thumping the old piano as though his life depended upon
it, was the one person present who saw nothing of what was going on; and he
suspected nothing amiss; he had been too busy with his notes to attend even to
the words. Every other eye was fixed upon the dancing girl; every other
forehead was wet with a cold perspiration. But Mr. Appleton was so far
unconsciously infected with the spirit of the proceedings that he was now
playing that banjo accompaniment at about double his rate of starting. And the
ornaments were rattling on mantelpiece and table and bracket, and a small
vase fell with a crash into the fender—Missy had brought it down with the toe
of one high-heeled shoe. Then with a whoop she was at the door. The door
was flung open. There was a flutter of white and a flare of crimson, neither
quite in the room nor precisely in the passage. The door was slammed, and the
girl gone.
Mr. Teesdale was the first to rise. His face was very pale and agitated. He
crossed the room and laid a hand upon the shoulder of Mr. Appleton, who was
still pounding with all his heart at the old piano. Appleton stopped and
revolved on the music-stool with a face of very comical ignorance and
amazement. Mr. Teesdale went on to the door and turned the handle. It did not
open. The key had been turned upon the outer side.

CHAPTER XIII.—ON THE VERANDAH.

Night had fallen, and Mr. Teesdale had the homestead all to himself.
Arabella and her mother had accompanied the ministers to evening worship in
the township chapel. John William was busy with the milking. As for Missy,
she had disappeared, as well she might, after her outrageous performance in
the best parlour. And Mr. Teesdale was beginning to wonder whether they
were ever to see her again; and if never, then what sort of report could he send
his old friend now?
He did not know. Her last prank was also incomparably her worst, it had
stunned poor David, and it left him unable to think coherently of Missy any
longer. Yet her own father had warned him that Miriam was a very modern
type of young woman; had hinted at the possibility of her startling simple
folks. Then again, David, who took his newspaper very seriously indeed, had
his own opinion of modern society in England and elsewhere. And if, as he
believed, Missy was a specimen of that society, then it was not right to be hard
upon the specimen. Had not he gathered long ago from the newspapers that the
music-hall song and dance had found their way into smart London drawing-
rooms? Now that he had heard that song, and seen that dance, were they much
worse than he had been led to suppose? If so, then society was even blacker
than it was painted, that was all. The individual in any case was not to blame,
but least of all in this case, where the individual had shown nothing but
kindness to an uninteresting old man, quite aside and apart from her position
in the old man's house as the child of his earliest friend.
And yet—and yet—he would do something to blot this last lurid scene out
of his mind. There was nothing he would not do, if only he could do that. Yet
this only showed him the narrowness of his own mind. That, after all, was half
the trouble. Here at the antipodes, in an overlooked corner that had missed
development with the colony, just as Mr. Teesdale himself had missed it: here
all minds must be narrow. But theirs at the farm were perhaps narrower than
most; otherwise they would never have been so shocked at Missy; at all events
they would not have shown their feelings, as they evidently must have shown
them, to have driven poor Missy off the premises, as they had apparently done.
Mr. Teesdale became greatly depressed as he made these reflections, and
gradually got as much of the blame on to his own shoulders as one man could
carry. It was very dark. He was sitting out on the verandah and smoking; but it
was too dark to enjoy a pipe properly, even if David could have enjoyed
anything just then. He was sitting in one of those wooden chairs in which he
had so often sat of late while Missy read to him, and one hand rested
mournfully upon the seat of the empty chair at his side. Not that he as yet
really dreaded never seeing Missy again. He was keeping a look-out for her all
the time. Sooner or later she was bound to come back.
She had come back already, but it was so dark that David never saw her
until he was putting a light to his second pipe. Then the face of Missy, with her
red hair tousled, came out of the night beyond the verandah with startling
vividness, and it was the most defiant face that ever David Tees-dale had
beheld.
"Missy," cried he, "is that you?"
He dropped the match and Missy's face was gone.
"Yes, it's me," said her voice, in such a tone as might have been expected
from her face.
"Then come in, child, come in," said David joyfully, pushing back his chair
as he rose. "I'm that glad you've come back, you can't think!"
"But I haven't come back—that's just it," answered the defiant voice out of
the night.
"Then I'm going to fetch you back, Missy. I'm going——"
"You stop in that verandah. If you come out I'll take to my heels and you'll
never see me again—never! Now look here, Mr. Teesdale, haven't I sickened
you this time?"
 "Done what, Missy?" asked David, uneasily, from the verandah. He could
see her outline now.
"Sickened you. I should have thought I'd sickened you just about enough
this trip, if you'd asked me. I should have said I'd choked you off for good and
all."
"You know you've done no such thing, Missy. What nonsense the child
will talk!"
"What! I didn't sicken you this afternoon?"
"No."
"Didn't disgust you, if you like that better?"
"No."
"Didn't make you perspire, the whole lot of you?"
"Of course you didn't, Missy. How you talk! You amused us a good deal,
and you surprised us, too, a bit; but that was all."
"Oh! So that was all, was it? So I only surprised you a bit? I suppose you
don't happen to know whether it was a big bit, eh?"
But David now decided that the time was come for firmness.
"Listen to me, Missy; I'm not going to have any more to say to you unless
you come inside at once!"
"But what if I'm not never coming inside—never no more?"
There was that within the words which made David pause to consider. At
length he said: "Very well, then, come into the verandah and we'll have a
sensible talk here, and I won't force you into the house; though where else
you're to go I don't quite see. However, come here, and I won't insist on your
coming a step further."
"Honour bright?"
"Of course."
"Hope to die?"
"I don't understand you, Missy; but I meant what I said."
"Then I'm coming. One moment, though! Is anybody about? Is Mrs.
Teesdale in the house?"
"No, she's gone to chapel. So has Arabella, and John William's milking.
They'll none of 'em be back just yet. Ah, that's better, my dear girl, that's
better!"
 Missy was back in her old wooden chair. Mr. Teesdale sat down again in
its fellow and put his hand affectionately upon the girl's shoulder.
"So you mean to tell me your hairs didn't stand on end!" said Missy, in a
little whisper that was as unnecessary as it was fascinating just then.
"I haven't got much to boast of," answered the old man cheerily; "but what
hair I have didn't do any such thing, Missy."
"Now just you think what you're saying," pursued the girl, with an air as of
counsel cautioning a witness. "You tell me I neither sickened you, nor
disgusted you, nor choked you off for good and all with that song and dance I
gave you this afternoon. Your hairs didn't stand on end, and I didn't even make
you perspire—so you say! But do you really mean me to believe you?"
"Why, bless the child! To be sure—to be sure!"
"Then, Mr. Teesdale, I must ask you whether you're in the habit of telling
lies."
David opened his mouth to answer very promptly indeed, but kept it open
without answering at all at the moment. He had remembered something that
sent his left thumb and forefinger of their own accord into an empty waistcoat
pocket. "No," said he presently with a sigh, "I'm not exactly in the habit of
saying what isn't true."
"But you do it sometimes?"
"I have done it, God forgive me! But who has not?"
"Not me," cried Missy candidly. "There's not a bigger liar in this world
than me! I'm going to tell you about that directly. I'm so glad you've told a lie
or two yourself—it gives me such a leg-up—though I never should have
thought it of you, Mr. Teesdale. I've told hundreds since I've known you. Have
you told any since you've known me?"
The question was asked with all the inquisitive sympathy of one
discovering a comrade in sin. "I mean not counting the ones you've just been
telling me," added Missy when she got no answer, "about your not being
shocked, and all the rest of it."
"That was no falsehood, Missy; that was the truth."
"All right, then, we'll pass that. Have you told any other lies since I've been
here? Just whisper, and I promise I won't let on. I do so want to know."
"But why, my dear—but why?"
"Because it'll be ever so much easier for me to make my confession when
you've made yours."
 "Your confession! What can you have to confess, Missy?" The old man
chuckled as he patted her hand.
"More than you're prepared for. But you must fire first. Have you or have
you not told a wicked story since I've been staying here?"
Mr. Teesdale cleared his throat and sat upright in his chair.
"Missy," said he solemnly, "the only untruth I can remember telling in all
my life, I have told since you have been with us; and I've told it over and over
again. Heaven knows why I admit this much to you! I suppose there's
something in you, my dear, that makes me say' more than ever I mean to say.
But I'm not going to say another word about this—that's flat."
"Good Lord!" murmured Missy. "And you've told it over and over and
over again! Oh, do tell me," she whispered coaxingly; "you might."
"My dear, I've told you too much already." And old Teesdale would have
risen and paced the verandah, but a pair of strong arms restrained him. They
were Missy's arms thrown round his neck, and the old man was content to sit
still.
"Tell me one thing," she wheedled softly: "had it anything to do with me—
that wicked story you've told so often?"
Mr. Teesdale was silent.
"Then it had something to do with me. Let me think. Had it anything—to
do with—your watch?... Then it had! And anything to do with that twenty
pounds you sent me to the post office?... Yes, it had! You pawned that watch to
get me that money. You said you had left it mending. I've heard you say so a
dozen times. So this is the lie you meant you'd told over and over again. And
all for me! O Mr. Teesdale, I am so sorry—I am—so—sorry."
She had broken down and was sobbing bitterly on his shoulder. The old
man stroked her head.
"You needn't take it so to heart, Missy dear. Nay, come! Shall I tell you
why? Because it wasn't all for you, Missy. I hardly knew you then. Nay,
honey, it was all for your dear father—no one else."
The effect of this distinction, made with a very touching sort of pride, was
to withdraw Missy's arms very suddenly from the old man's neck, and to leave
her sitting and trembling as far away from him as possible, though still in her
chair. Her moment was come; but her nerve and her courage, her coolness and
steadiness of purpose, where were they now?
She braced herself together with a powerful effort. Hours ago she had
resolved, under influences that may be remembered, to undeceive the too
trustful old man now at her side. To that resolve she still adhered; but as it had
since become evident that nothing she could possibly do would lead him to
suspect the truth, there was now no way for her but the hardest way of all—
that of a full and clean confession. Her teeth were chattering when she began,
but Mr. Teesdale understood her to say:
"Before you told your lie I had told you a dozen—I spoke hardly a word of
truth all the way into Melbourne that day. But there was one great, big,
tremendous lie at the bottom of all the rest. And can't you guess what that
was? You must guess—I can never tell you—I couldn't get it out."
Mr. Teesdale was very silent. "Yes, I think I can guess," he said at last, and
sadly enough.
"Then what was it?" exclaimed Missy in an eager whisper. She was
shivering with excitement.
"Well, my dear, I suppose it was to do with them friends you had to meet at
the theatre. You might have trusted me a bit more, Missy! I shouldn't have
thought so much of it, after all."
"Of what?"
"Why, of your going to the theatre alone. Wasn't that it, Missy?"
The girl moaned. "Oh, no—no! It was something ever so much worse than
that."
"Then you weren't stopping with friends at all. Was that it? Yes, you were
staying all by yourself at one of the hotels."
"No—no—no. It was ever so much worse than that too. That was one of
the lies I told you, but it was nothing like the one I mean."
"Missy," old David said gravely, "I don't want to know what you mean. I
don't indeed! I'd far rather know nothing at all about it."
"But you must know!" cried Missy in desperation.
"Why must I?"
"Because this has gone on far too long. And I never meant it to go on at all.
No, I give you my oath I only meant to have a lark in the beginning—to have a
lark and be done with it! Anyhow I can't keep it up any longer; that's all about
it, and—but surely you can guess now, Mr. Teesdale, can't you?"
Again the old man was long in answering. "Yes," he exclaimed at length,
and with such conviction in his voice that Missy grasped her chair-arms tight
and sat holding her breath. "Yes, I do see now. You borrowed that money not
because you really needed it, but because——"
 The girl's groans stopped him. "To think that you can't guess," she wailed,
"though I've as good as told you in so many words!"
"No, I can't guess," answered David decisively. "What's more, I don't want
to. So I give it up. Hush, Missy, not another word! I won't have it! I'll put my
fingers in my ears if you will persist. I don't care whether it's true or whether it
isn't, I'm not going to sit here and listen to you pitching into yourself when—
when——"
"When what?"
"Why, when I've grown that fond of you, my dear!"
"And are you fond of me?" said Missy, in a softened voice that quivered
badly. She put her arms once more round the old man's neck, and let her
tousled head rest again upon his shoulder. "Are you really so fond of me as all
that?"
"My dear, we all are. You know that as well as I do."
Missy made one important exception in her own mind, but not aloud. Kind,
worn fingers were now busy with her hair, now patting her shoulder tenderly;
and in all her poor life Missy had never known a father or a father's love. Even
with the will she could not have spoken for some minutes. When she did speak
next it was to echo the old man's last words; "Yes, I know that as well as you
do. And I know how it hurts! But tell me, can you possibly be as fond of me
after this afternoon?"
"I can," said old Teesdale. "I can only speak for myself. Maybe I think
more of you than anyone else does; I've seen more of you, and had more of
your kindness. Nothing could make me forget that, Missy—how you've sat
with me, and walked with me, and read to me, and taken notice of the old man,
no matter who else was by or who wasn't. No, I could never forget all that, my
dear; nothing that you could do could make me forget one half of that!"
"And nothing that I have done?"
"Still less anything that you have done."
"But if you found out that I'd been deceiving you all along, and obtained
every mortal thing on false pretences, and taken the filthiest advantage of your
kindness—surely that would wipe out any little good turns which anybody
would have done you? Of course it would!"
"It might. But anybody wouldn't have done 'em—anybody wouldn't," the
old man said, leaving a kiss upon the hair between his fingers. "At all events,
Missy, there's one thing that nothing could blot out; for whatever you did,
you'd still be your dear father's daughter!"
 Very slowly and deliberately, Missy unwound her arms and lifted her head,
and got out of the chair, and stood to her full height in the dark verandah.
"That's just it," she said calmly, distinctly. "That's just what I was coming
to."
But Mr. Teesdale had also risen, and he was not listening to Missy. For
footsteps were drawing near through the grass—footsteps and the rustle of
stiff Sunday gowns, and the creaking of comfortless Sunday boots—and a
harsh voice was crying more harshly than was even its wont:
"Is that you, David? And is that Miriam beside you? And how dare she
come back and show her face, I wonder? Ay, that's what I want to know!"
David ran to meet and expostulate with his harder half. It was seldom that
he even tried to quell that outspoken tongue; but now he both tried and
succeeded, though Missy in the verandah could not hear by how much artifice
or in what words. In another minute, however, Mr. Teesdale was again at her
side, while his wife and daughter went past them and into the house without
further parley.
These few words were then exchanged in the verandah:
"Missy, she didn't mean it. You'll hear no more about it—not a word from
anybody."
"I deserve to, nevertheless."
"So you'll come in, won't you, and have your supper like a dear good girl?"
"Ah, yes, I'll come in now."
"I was so afraid—Mrs. T. is that hasty and plain-spoken—that what she
said might make you say you'd never come into our house any more."
"Not it," said Missy with a laugh. "That's the sort of thing to have the very
opposite effect upon you. Come on in!"

CHAPTER XIV.—A BOLT FROM THE BLUE.

Mr. Teesdale sat at his end of the old green tablecloth, reading a singularly
unseasonable communication from that middle-man who bought the milk but
was never in a position to pay for it. The time was half-past eleven in the
forenoon of Boxing Day, and the daily delivery of letters had just taken place.
It was naturally a little later than usual, but Mr. Teesdale wished with all his
heart that there had been no delivery at all. At length he raised a tired face
from his bad news, and let his eyes rest for the comfort of his spirit upon the
red head and fringe of his solitary companion in the parlour. Missy was seated
on the sofa, and all of her but the top of her head and the bottom of her dress,
with a finger or two of each hand, was hidden behind the Argus newspaper.
Missy always liked to see the Argus as soon as it came, though by that time it
was never less than a day old, because Mr. Teesdale had it from a friend when
the friend was done with it. This morning, as usual, he had handed it to the girl
before opening his letters. He now sat staring absently at the girl's hair, and
was therefore somewhat slow to notice that the narrow strip of forehead under
the fringe was gone so white that it was difficult to tell where paper ended and
forehead began. No sooner had David seen this, however, than he saw also the
paper jumping up and down in the girl's grasp; whereupon the unpleasant
letter in his own hands went straightway out of his head.
"Missy," he cried, "what's the matter, my dear? What have you seen?"
Missy dashed down the paper and was on her feet in an instant. There was
extraordinary spirit in the action, and her eyes were very bright.
"What have I seen?" she repeated, in a tone that suppressed excitement
rather than concern. "Nothing; that is, nothing that could interest any of you;
only something about a friend of mine."
Yet she bounced out of the room without another word, and forthwith went
in search of Arabella.
She found her in the dairy, which was half under the ground, and wholly
out of the way.
"Arabella," she cried wildly, "put down that bowl and shake hands. We're
safe!"
Now Arabella was not a person of quick perceptions. She was imaginative,
she was inquisitive, she had a romantic side which had very nearly been the
ruin of her at the responsible age of thirty-two. Like the parent whom she so
strongly resembled in her undiscerning nature and easygoing temperament,
she was sufficiently credulous, weak, and unwise in her generation. On the
other hand, she was by no means without her father's merits. She had the same
talent for affection, the same positive genius for uncommon gratitude. She
could never make light of a good turn, not even in her own mind; nor out of
her own mouth could she make too much of one. In the family circle she had
been very silent and subdued during these last days, but to Missy in private
she had opened a contrite and a very grateful heart more times than the other
had liked to listen. Vague doubts and suspicions of Missy she had entertained
in the beginning; she might have them still; nay, they might well be stronger
than ever, after yesterday.
 But one thing was now certain concerning these shy misgivings; they
might rise to the mind, but they would never again pass the lips. No matter
what Missy did or said, henceforth, Arabella would shield her with all the
ingenuity at her command: which was not a little: only it was sometimes
hindered by a certain slowness to perceive which frequently accompanies a
constitutional readiness to imagine. So when Missy wanted her to shake hands
because they were safe, Arabella looked perfectly blank.
"How are we safe?" she asked. "What are we safe from?"
"Why, from your friend."
"My friend? Ah!" She understood now.
"Yes, he won't trouble us much more," pursued Missy, sidling rhythmically
from one foot to the other, while her eyes lit up the dairy. "O 'Bella, 'Bella, if
you knew how I feel——"
"Stop a moment," said Arabella, white as the milk that she had spilled in
her agitation; "is he—is he—dead?"
"Dead? I wish he was. No, no; he's only in prison."
"In prison?"
"Yes; run in the day before Christmas Eve—the day after I swep' him out o'
this—no, the very day itself. See where you'd ha' been! 'Bella, 'Bella, let's
drink his health in a pint of cream! It seems too good to be true."
But Arabella was grasping with both hands the shelf which supported the
bowls of milk for creaming, and her face was drawn and wretched.
"Don't, Missy!" she exclaimed with tears in her voice. "You wouldn't if
you knew how sorry I am. What is he in prison for? What has he been doing?"
"Writing a cheque he had no business to write and getting the money.
That's what it was this time. But it isn't the first time; no, don't you believe it."
"I am so sorry," repeated Arabella, covering her eyes.
"But why? What for?"
"For him. I—I thought I loved him."
"You thought you loved him," Missy repeated buoyantly. She was all
buoyancy now. "Yes, many a girl has thought that before you, my dear. And
them that thought it too long, they didn't come to think they hated him. Not
they! They jolly soon knew!"
The other's wet eyes were wide open.
"How is this, Missy? You seem to know all about him. You never told me
that before."
"No, I didn't. What was the use when I'd got rid of him—for the time
being, anyway? I was very much afraid he'd turn up again, and I was keeping
what I knew until he did. I thought it'd be time enough to tell you then; but I'll
tell you now if you like. It makes no difference one way or the other, now that
our friend's in quod. Very well then, as soon as ever I heard his voice that dark
night I knew that I'd heard it before. Never mind where—maybe in England,
maybe on the ship, maybe after I landed in Melbourne. You mustn't want to
know too much. It's good enough, isn't it, that I knew what sort he was, and
that when I'd known him before he was sailing under another name altogether?
Yes, I thought that'd knock you! You knew Stanborough, I knew Mowbray,
and the police, they've run in a man of the name of Paolo Verini, alias Thomas
Stanborough, alias Paul Mowbray. 'A handsome man of foreign appearance,'
the Argus says. You may look for yourself. But if that isn't good enough for
you I don't know what is."
"It might be someone else for all that," murmured Arabella, shuddering at
the thought of the man in prison. "Have you any other reason for making so
certain that it is the same?"
"I have. I wouldn't tell you before, but now what does it matter? I've
expected him turning up every hour since that night. He swore that he would;
and he would have, you may depend, if he hadn't got run in."
Arabella was silent; she felt that also. She had never been able to
understand how a man of so firm a purpose as her lover should have made so
facile a capitulation to a mere girl like Missy. Presently she asked a question:
"Did he recognise you. Missy?"
"No," replied Missy, after a little hesitation. "No, he did not," she repeated
more firmly. "And look you here,'Bella, take my advice and never give him
another thought. He was a bad egg, that's what he was; you may thank your
stars that he is where he is, as I thank mine."
"I can't help being sorry," sighed Arabella, wiping her eyes with her apron;
"but that doesn't make me less thankful to you, Missy. You've saved me, body
and soul. I was under a spell, but you broke it. I don't understand it. I can't feel
it now. But God knows how I felt it then, and what would have got me but for
you! So I can never be thankful enough to you, Missy, and I shall never, never
be able to tell you how thankful I am."
"Then never try," said Missy lightly; "only think kindly of me when you
find it a hard job. That's all you've got to try to do."
And with a light-hearted laugh and a kiss from the fingers Missy was out
of the dairy and above ground in the brilliant noonday sun.
There was no one about in the yard. Missy was glad of that, because there
was no living soul whom she desired to see or to speak to for hours to come.
The naked sword hanging over her head had suddenly been lifted down,
snapped, and thrown away; she must be alone to appreciate that. Nevertheless
this should be her last day at the farm; and again, she must be alone to make
the most of the last day. Alone to consider all things, especially the life lying
ahead; alone to drink for the last time of the sweet sensations of this peaceful
spot, and so deeply, that the taste should be with her till her dying day. Then
she would depart in peace; and lastly, she must be alone to invent the why and
wherefore of this departure.
So she opened the gate leading out of the yard, and going down through
the gum-trees into that shallow gully, she mounted the other side, and stopped
to stand in triumph under the very tree from behind which Stanborough, or
Verini, had sprung and caught her in his arms. She pictured him in his cell at
that moment, with only one small iron-barred square of that blue sky which
was all for her; and she drew into her throat and nostrils a long draught of
eucalyptus perfume. This was one of the sensations which she desired always
to remember. At length, still sniffing and glancing ever at the deep blue sky
above the tree-tops, yet with both eyes and ears attentive to her friends the
parrots, she turned sharp to the left, crossed the road below the Cultivation,
and struck into the thick of the timber on the further side.
She had shut out of her light mind every thought of penitence and remorse.
There was no further occasion for her to take a serious view of the situation.
The very air seemed charged with a new and most delicious sense of freedom;
enough, for the present, to revel in this, without thinking of anything at all.
Another comparatively new sense, that of her own iniquity, was a dead nerve
for the time being. Missy was too thankful for what she had escaped to
consider what she deserved; indeed, she had considered this sufficiently. On
the other hand, she was enjoying a natural reaction in the most natural manner
imaginable. All by herself, among the gum-trees, she burst into song, or rather
the snatch of one. And on the whole one would call it unconscious song, for
the snatch ran—
"You should 'a' seen 'im jump!
I didn't give a dump!
For I yells to 'is pals
'Now look at him, gals—
'Arry 'e 'as the——'"
 Here it broke off. Missy halted too.
"Morning, John William," said she.
He was standing in front of her, with his gun under his arm and a dead hare
in the other hand. He returned her salute gravely. Then—
"You seem very happy," he said, with a spice of bitterness.
"Oh, I haven't got it," laughed Missy, "have you?"
"Got what?"
"The 'ump."
He shook his head and grinned; as he looked at her the grin broadened.
"So I didn't shock your head off, either!" exclaimed Missy.
"Not likely. I thought it was splendid myself."
"Then why did you look so glum just now?"
"Missy, I didn't——"
"You did! I thought you'd caught the 'ump from 'Arry. I believe you have.
You're looking as glum as ever again!"
It was true. But he said:
"Missy, I don't feel a bit glum."
"No?"
She was examining him coolly, critically, and he knew it.
"Not a bit!" he reiterated, hacking out a tuft of grass with his right heel.
Then his miserable eyes rose fiercely upon the girl. She had been waiting for
this look, however.
"You are making a great mistake," she said, "if you are imagining yourself
the least little atom in love with me."
For the instant her outspokenness enraged him; then it made him meek.
"I am imagining no such thing, Missy; I know it. But I also know that it is
a mistake—when you are so far above me."
"There you go! That is your mistake. It's the other way about—it's you
that's so far above me. John William, if you only knew what a bad lot I am—-"
"I don't care what you are."
"You don't know what I am. That's just it! I'm not what you think I am, I'm
not what I make myself out to be; I'm not—I'm not!"
 She was speaking passionately, being, in fact, once more on the verge of a
full confession. All in a moment the impulse had come over her, and nothing
could have stopped her but the thing that did. John William was not listening
to a word she said; he was only gazing in her eyes.
"I don't care what you are, Missy; I shouldn't care if you were as black as
sin! No, I should like it, for the blacker you were, the nearer I should be to you
—the more chance I should have. If you were bad—which is all nonsense—
you would still be too good for me; but I should love you, Missy, whether or
no. I shall love you all my days!" He looked at her once with ravening eyes,
and then spun round upon his heel. She called him back in a broken voice to
tell him everything; but he shook his head without looking round, and the tree-
trunks closed behind him like a door. Then Missy drew a very long breath,
wiped her eyes, and sat down to think.
Her conscience was wide awake now. For an hour she let it tear and rend
her. By the end of the second hour she had hardened her heart once more.
"I'm not meant to confess, that's evident," she exclaimed aloud. "I was a
little fool ever to think of it."
A little fool, at that rate, she continued to be; inasmuch as for yet another
hour she permitted her mind to dwell upon her attempted confessions, to old
Teesdale yesterday, to John William to-day. It hurt her to think of the kindness
and credulity of those two. It hurt her so much that she wept bitterly, only
thinking of old David and John William his son. Yet she was thankful they had
not listened, she was thankful they did not know, she was doubly thankful that
she was to go away of her own accord, and without being found out after all. If
she could ever make the slightest atonement! But that was for future thought.
The afternoon was well advanced when Missy once more crossed the road
below the Cultivation. She was now in a perfectly philosophic frame of mind.
Also she had slightly altered her plans. She would not invent an excuse for her
departure; she would go without saying a word to any of them; she would run
away in the night. And she would leave all her things behind her. The present
value of them would not go far towards redeeming Mr. Teesdale's watch; still
they must be worth something.
This she was thinking as she came to the end of the gum-trees, and opened
the gate which was grown familiar to her hand and eye. Then suddenly she
reflected that dinner must long be over, that she would barely be in time for
tea. And the goodness of Mrs. Teesdale's tea was the next thought that filled
her mind: she had the smell in her nostrils, she could almost feel the hot fluid
coursing over her parched palate as she rounded the hen-yard and caught sight
of the verandah. Thereat she came to a sudden standstill, and yet another new
set of thoughts. The verandah was half hidden by a two-horse buggy drawn up
in front of it.
"More visitors!" said Missy. "Well, I won't shock this lot. I wonder who
they are? They must be swells!"
In fact, a man in livery held the reins, the afternoon sun made fireworks
with the burnished harness, and the buggy was a very good one indeed.
Missy kept her eyes upon it as she approached the house. She never saw
the faces that appeared for an instant at the parlour window and then
disappeared. Her foot was lifted, to be set down in the verandah, when the
door was flung open, and Mrs. Teesdale marched forth.
"Stand back!" she screamed. "Not another step! You would dare to set foot
inside my doors again!"
Missy fell back in wonderment. As she did so a dainty-looking young lady
appeared in the doorway behind Mrs. Teesdale, and screwed up her fair face at
the glare of the afternoon sun. And Missy left off wondering, for in an instant
she knew who that dainty-looking young lady must be.

CHAPTER XV.—A DAY OF RECKONING.

Missy retreated a step from the verandah, stood still, and gasped. Then she
pressed both hands to her left side. She was as one walking on the down line
in order to avoid the up train, only to be cut to pieces by the down express,
whose very existence she had forgotten.
Her eyes fastened themselves upon one object. Presently she found that it
was Mrs. Teesdale's pebble brooch. Her ears rang with a harsh, shrill voice; it
took her mind some moments to capture the words and grasp their meaning.
"You wicked, wicked, ungrateful woman! To dare to come here and pass
yourself off as Miriam Oliver, and live with us all these weeks—you lying
hussy! If you have anything to say for yourself be sharp and say it, then out
you pack!"
The convicted girl now beheld the verandah swimming with people. As her
sight cleared, however, she could only count four, including Mrs. Teesdale.
There was the veritable Miss Oliver, but Missy took no note of her just then.
There was Arabella, white and weeping; and there was Mr. Teesdale, looking
years older since the morning, with the saddest expression Missy had ever
seen upon human countenance. He was gazing, not at her, but down upon the
ground at her feet. John William was not there at all. Missy looked about for
him very wistfully, but in vain; and her glance ended, where it had begun,
upon the furious face of Mrs. Teesdale. Furious as it was, the wretched girl
found it much the easiest face to meet with a firm lip and a brazen front.
"Do you know that you could be sent to prison?" Mrs. Teesdale proceeded,
still at a scream. "Ay, and I'll see that you are sent, and all!"
"Nay, come!" muttered Mr. Teesdale, shaking his head at the grass, but
without looking at anybody.
Then suddenly he lifted his eyes, stepped down from the verandah, and
went up to Missy.
"Missy," said he, in a low, hoarse voice, "Missy, I'll take your word as soon
as the word of a person I've never set eyes on before. Is this true, or is it not?
Are you, or are you not, Miriam Oliver, the daughter of my old friend?"
"It is true," said Missy. "I'm no more Miriam Oliver than you are."
Neither question nor answer had reached the ears of those in the verandah.
But they saw David turn towards them with his head hanging lower than
before, and he tottered as he rejoined them. Miss Oliver, however, may have
guessed what had passed, for she smiled a supercilious smile which no one
happened to observe. This young lady was a contrast to her impersonator in
every imaginable way. She was not nearly so tall, and she had exceedingly fair
hair. Her nose was tip-tilted to begin with, but she seemed to have a habit of
turning it up even beyond the design of nature. This was perhaps justified on
the present occasion. She was very fashionably dressed in a costume of
extremely light gray; and in the dilapidated framework of the old verandah she
was by far the most incongruous figure upon the scene.
"Has she anything to say for herself?" Mrs. Teesdale demanded of her
husband. He shook his head despondently.
And then, at last, Missy opened her mouth.
"I have only this to say for myself. It isn't much, but Mr. Teesdale will tell
you that it's the truth. It's only that I did do my level best to make a clean
breast to him last night."
"She did!" exclaimed the old man, after a moment's rapid consideration.
"Now I see what she meant. To think that I never saw then!"
"You were very dense," said Missy; "but not worse than John William. I
did my best to tell you last night, and I did my best to tell him only this
morning, but neither of you would understand."
As she spoke to the old man her voice was strangely gentle, and a smile
was hovering about the corners of her mouth when she ceased. Moreover, her
words had brought out a faint ray of light upon Mr. Teesdale's dejected mien.
 "It's a fact!" he cried, turning to the others. "She did her best to confess last
night. She did confess. I remember all about it now. It was a full confession, if
only I'd put two and two together. But—well, I never could have believed it of
her. That was it!"
He finished on a sufficiently reproachful note.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Teesdale turned upon him as fiercely as though he had
spoken from a brief in Missy's defence.
"What if she had confessed? I'm ashamed of you, David, going on as
though that could ha' made any difference! She'd still have deceived us and
lied to us all these weeks. Black is black and this—this woman—is that black
that God Himself couldn't whiten her!"
And Mrs. Teesdale shook her fist at the guilty girl.
"We have none of us a right to say that," murmured David.
"But I do say it, and I mean it, too. I say that she'd still have stolen
Miriam's letter of introduction, and come here deliberately and passed herself
off as Miriam, and slept under our roof, and eaten-our bread, under false
pretences—false pretences as shall put her in prison if I have anything to do
with it! No confession could have undone all that; and no confession shall
keep her out of prison neither, not if I know it!"
Some of them were expecting Missy to take to her heels any moment; but
she never showed the least sign of doing so.
"No, nothing can undo it," she said herself. "I've known that for some time,
and I shan't be sorry to pay the cost."
Then the real Miss Oliver put in her word. It was winged with a sneer.
"It was hardly a compliment," she said, "to take her for me! You might ask
her, by the way, when and where she stole my letters. I lost several." She could
not permit herself to address the culprit direct.
"I'll tell you that," said Missy, "and everything else too, if you like to
listen."
"Do, Missy!" cried Arabella, speaking also for the first time. "And then I'll
tell them something."
"Be sharp, then," said Mrs. Teesdale. "We're not going to stand here much
longer listening to the likes of you. If you've got much to say, you'd better
keep it for the magistrate!"
Missy shook her head at Arabella, stared briefly but boldly at Mrs.
Teesdale, and then addressed herself to the fair girl in gray, who raised her
eyebrows at the liberty.
"You remember the morning after you landed in the Parramatta? It was a
very hot day, about a couple of months ago, but in the forenoon you went for a
walk with a lady friend. And you took the Fitzroy Gardens on your way."
Miss Oliver nodded, without thinking whom she was nodding to. This was
because she had become very much interested all in a moment; the next, she
regretted that nod, and set herself to listen with a fixed expression of disgust.
"You walked through the Fitzroy Gardens, you stopped to look at all the
statues, and then you sat down on a seat. I saw you, because I was sitting on
the next seat. You sat on that seat, and you took out some letters and read bits
of them to your friend. I could hear your voices, but I couldn't hear what you
were saying, and I didn't want to, either. I had my own things to think about,
and they weren't very nice thinking, I can tell you! That hot morning, I
remember, I was just wishing and praying to get out of Melbourne for good
and all. And when I passed your seat after you'd left it, there were your letters
lying under it on the gravel. I picked them up, and I looked up and down for
you and your friend. You were out of sight, but I made for the entrance and
waited for you there. Yes, I did—you may sneer as much as you like! But you
never came, and when I went back to my lodgings I took your letters with
me."
Still the young lady sneered without speaking, and Missy hardened her
heart.
"I read them every one," she said defiantly. "I had nothing to do with
myself during the day, and very good reading they were! And in the afternoon,
just for the lark of it, I took your letter of introduction, which was among the
rest, and then I took the 'bus and came out here."
She turned now to David, and continued in that softer voice which she
could not help when speaking to him.
"It was only for the fun of it! I had no idea of ever coming out again. But
you made so much of me; you were all so kind—and the place—it was heaven
to a girl like me!"
Here she surprised them all, but one, by breaking down. Mr. Teesdale was
not astonished. When she recovered her self-control it was to him she turned
her swimming eyes; it was the look in his that enabled her to go on.
"If you knew what my life was!" she wailed; "if you knew how I hated it!
If you knew how I longed to come out into the country, when I saw what the
country was like! I had never seen your Australian country before. It was all
new to me. I had only been a year out from home, but at home I lived all my
life in London. My God, what a life! But I never meant to come back to you—
I said I wouldn't—and then I said you must take the consequences if I did.
Even when I said good-bye to you, Mr. Teesdale, I never really thought of
coming back; so you see I repaid your kindness not only by lies, but by
robbing you——"
She pulled herself up. David had glanced uneasily towards his wife. The
girl understood.
"By robbing you of your peace of mind, for I said that I would come back,
never meaning to at all. And now do you know why I was in such a hurry to
get to the theatre? Yes, it was because I had an engagement there. All the rest
was lies. And I never should have come out to you again, only at last I saw in
the Argus that she—that Miss Oliver—had gone to Sydney. Don't you
remember how you'd seen it too? Well, then I felt safe. I was only a ballet-girl,
I'd done better once, for at home I'd had a try in the halls. So I chucked it up
and came out to you. I thought I should see in the Argus when Miss Oliver
came back from Sydney, but somehow I've missed it. And now——"
She flung wide her arms, and raised her eyes, and looked from the sky
overhead to the river-timber away down to the right, and from the river-timber
to David Teesdale.
"And now you may put me in prison as fast as you like. I've been here two
months. They're well worth twelve of hard labour, these last two months on
this farm!"
She had finished.
Mrs. Teesdale turned to her husband. "The brazen slut!" she cried. "Not a
word of penitence! She doesn't care—not she! To prison she shall go, and we'll
see whether that makes her care."
But David shook his head. "No, no, my dear! I will not have her sent to
prison. What good could it do us or her? Rather let her go away quietly, and
may the Almighty forgive her—and—and make her——"
He looked down, and there was Missy on her knees to him. "Can you
forgive me?" she cried passionately. "Say that you forgive me, and then send
me to prison or any place you like. Only say that you forgive me if you can."
"I can," said the old man softly, "and I do. But I am not the One. You shall
not go to prison, but you must go away from us, and may God have mercy on
you and help you to lead a better life hereafter. You—you have been very kind
to me in little ways, Missy, and I shall try to think kindly of you too."
He spoke with great emotion, and as he did so his trembling hand rested
ever so lightly upon the red head from which the hat was tilted back. And the
girl seized that kind, caressing hand, and raised it to her lips, but let it drop
without allowing them to touch it. Then she rose and retreated under their
eyes. And all the good women had been awed to silence by this leave-taking;
but one of them recovered herself in time to put a shot into the retiring enemy.
"Mr. Teesdale is a deal too lenient," cried the farmer's wife. "He's been like
that all his life! If I'd had my way, to prison you should have gone—to prison
you should have gone, you shameless bad woman, you!"
Old David heard it without a word. He was seeing the last of Missy as she
descended the pad-dock by the path that led down to the slip-rails; the very
last that he saw of her was the sunlight upon her hair and hat.
Arabella had darted into the house, and she now came out with a small
bundle of things in her arms. With these she followed Missy, coming up with
her at the slip-rails, against which she was leaning with her face buried in her
hands.
Now this was the spot where Arabella had first met the man from whom
this abandoned girl had rescued her, body and soul. She had desired to tell
them all that story, to show them the good in Missy, and so make them less
hard upon her. The person who had prevented her, by forbidding look and
vigorous gesture, was Missy herself....
It was half an hour later when Arabella returned to the house. This was
what she was in time to see and hear.
The real Miss Oliver was sitting in the buggy beside the man in livery,
replying, with chilly smiles and decided shakes of her fair head, to the joint
remonstrances, exhortations, and persuasions of Mr. and Mrs. Teesdale, who
were standing together on the near side of the buggy.
"But I've just made the tea this minute," Arabella heard her mother
complain. "Surely you'll stop and have your tea with us after coming all this
way?"
"Thank you so much; it is very kind of you; but I promised to be back at
the picnic in time for tea, and it is some miles away."
"But Mrs. Teesdale takes a special pride in her tea," said David, "and she
has made it, so that we shouldn't keep you waiting at all."
"So kind of you; but I'm afraid I have stayed too long already. I was just
waiting to say goodbye to Mrs. Teesdale. Good-bye again——"
"Come, Miriam," said Mrs. T., a little testily, "or we shall be offended!"
"I should be very sorry to offend you, I am sure, but really my friends lent
me their buggy on the express condition——"
 From her manner Mr. Teesdale saw that further pressing would be useless.
"We will let you go now," said he, "if you will come back and stay with us
as long as you can."
"For a month at least," added Mrs. T.
Miss Oliver looked askance.
"We are such very old friends of your parents," pleaded David.
"We would like to be your parents as long as you remain in Australia,"
Mrs. Teesdale went so far as to say. And already her tone was genuinely kind
and motherly, as it had never become towards poor Missy in all the past two
months.
Miss Oliver raised her eyebrows; luckily they were so light that the
grimace was less noticeable than it otherwise might have been.
"Suppose we write about it?" said she at length. "Yes, that would be the
best. I have several engagements, and I am only staying out a few weeks
longer. But I will certainly come out and see you again if I can."
"And stay with us?" said Mrs. T.
"And stay a night with you—if I can."
"By this time," exclaimed David, "we might have had our tea and been
done with it. Won't you think better of it and jump down now? Come, for your
parents' sakes—I wish you would."
"So do I, dear knows!" said Mrs. Teesdale wistfully. But Miss Oliver, this
time without speaking, shook her head more decidedly than ever; gave the old
people a bow apiece worthy of Hyde Park; and drove off without troubling to
notice the daughter of the house, who, however, was not thinking of her at all,
but of Missy.

CHAPTER XVI.—A MAN'S RESOLVE.

How to tell John William when he came home, that was the prime
difficulty in the mind of Arabella. Tell him she must, as soon as ever he got in.
She felt it of importance that he should hear the news first from herself, and
not, for example, from their mother. But it was going to be a very disagreeable
duty; more so, indeed, than she ever could have dreamt, until Missy herself
warned her, almost with her last words, at the slip-rails. Missy had opened her
eyes for her during those few final minutes. Till then she had suspected
nothing between her brother and the girl. And now the case seemed so clear
and so inevitable that her chief cause for wonderment lay in her own previous
want of perception. It made her very nervous, however, with the news still to
break to John William. She wished that he would make haste home. He had
ridden off early in the afternoon to look up another young farmer several miles
distant; not that he wanted to see anyone at all, but because he was ill at ease
and anxious to be out of Missy's way, as Arabella now made sure. But poor
Missy! And poor John William! Would they ever see each other again? She
hoped not. Her heart grieved for them both, but she hoped not. No woman,
being also a sister of the man concerned, could know about another woman
what Arabella now knew against Missy, and hope otherwise. And the state of
her own feelings in the matter was her uppermost trouble, when at last John
William trotted his mare into the yard, and Arabella followed him into the
stable.
Then and there she hurriedly told all. Her great dread was that their mother
might appear on the scene and tell it in her way. But the attitude of the man
greatly astonished Arabella. He took the news so coolly—but that was not it.
He seemed not at all agitated to hear what Missy was, and who she was not,
but very much so on learning how summarily she had been sent about her
business. He said very little even then, but Arabella knew that he was
trembling all over as he unsaddled the mare.
"My heart bled for the poor thing," she added, speaking the simple truth.
"It would have bled even if she hadn't done more for me than ever I can tell
anybody. I was thankful I went after her, and saw the last of her at the rails
——"
"Which way did she go?"
"To the township to begin with; but she gave me——"
"Which way did she mean to go—straight back to Melbourne?"
"She didn't say. I was going on to tell you that at the slip-rails she gave me
some messages for you, John William."
"We will have them afterwards. Let us go in to supper now."
"Very well—but stay! Are you prepared for mother? She is dreadful about
it; she makes it even worse than it is."
"I am prepared for anything. I shall not open my mouth."
Nor did he; but the provocation was severe. Mrs. Teesdale was glad of an
opportunity of rehearsing the whole story from beginning to end. This enabled
her to decide what epithets were too weak for the occasion, and what names
were as nearly bad enough for Missy as any that a respectable woman could
lay her tongue to; also, by what she now said, this excellent woman
strengthened her own rather recent convictions that she had "suspected
something of the kind" about Missy from the very first. Certainly she had felt
a strong antipathetic instinct from the very first. Quite as certainly she had
now just cause for righteous rage and desires the most vindictive. Yet there
was not one of those three, her nearest, who did not feel a fresh spasm of pain
at each violent word, because every one of them, save the wife and mother,
had some secret cause to think softly of the godless girl who was gone, and to
look back upon her more in pity than in blame.
For sadness, Mr. Teesdale was the saddest of them all. He crept to his bed a
shaken old man, and had to listen to his wife until he thought she must break
his heart. Meantime Arabella and John William foregathered in the latter's
room, and talked in whispers in order not to wake two old people who had
neither of them closed an eye.
"About those messages," said John William. "What were they?"
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, and he pared a cake of tobacco as he
spoke. His wideawake lay on the quilt beside him, and he had not taken off his
boots. Arabella stood uneasily.
"Poor girl! she spoke about you a good deal just at the last."
Arabella hesitated.
"I want to know what she said," observed John William dryly.
"Well, first she was sorry you weren't there."
"If I had been she never should have gone like that!"
"What, not when everything had come out——"
"No, not at all; she shouldn't have been kicked out, anyway. I'd have given
her time and then driven her back to Melbourne, with all her things. What
right have we with them, I should like to know?"
"She wanted us to keep them, she——"
"Wanted us! I'd have let her want, if I'd been here. However, go on. She
was sorry I wasn't there, was she?"
"Well, at first she said so, but in a little while she told me that she was
glad. And after that she said I didn't know how glad she was for you never to
set eyes on her again!"
"Never's a long time," muttered John William.
"Did she explain herself?" he added, as loud as they ventured to speak.
 "Y—yes." Arabella was hesitating.
"Then out with it!"
"She told me—it can't be true, but yet she did tell me—that you—fancied
yourself in love with her, John William!"
"It isn't true."
"Thank God for that!"
"Stop a moment. Not so fast, my girl! It isn't true—because there's no
fancy at all about it, d'ye see?"
Arabella saw. It was written and painted all over his lined yet glowing
face; but where there could be least mistake about it was in his eyes. They
were ablaze with love—with love for a woman who had neither name, honour,
nor common purity. He could not know this. But Arabella knew all, and it was
her business—nay, her solemn undertaking—to repeat all that she knew to
John William.
"I was told," she faltered, "what to say to you if you said that."
"Who told you?"
"She did—Missy."
"Then say it right out."
But that was difficult between brother and sister. At first he refused to
understand, and then he refused to believe.
"It's a lie!" he cried hoarsely. "I don't believe a word of it!"
"And do you suppose I would make it up? Upon my sacred honour, John
William, it is only what she told me with her own——"
"I know that; it's her lie—I never meant it was yours. No, no, it's Missy's
lie to choke me off. But it shan't! No, by Heaven, and it shouldn't if it were the
living truth!"
There was no more to be said. The man knew that, and he relit the pipe,
which he had scarcely tasted, without looking at the sister whom he had
silenced. Presently he said in a perfectly passionless voice, coming back from
the unspeakable to a point which it was possible to discuss:
"About those things of hers—all her clothes. Did you say that she wanted
us to keep them? And if so, why?"
"Because," said Arabella with some reluctance, "they were bought with
money which—as she said herself—she had obtained from father on false
pretences."
 It may have been because he was now quite calm outwardly, but at this the
man winced more visibly than at what had come out before.
"From father," he repeated at length; "he couldn't let her have much,
anyway!"
"He let her have twenty pounds."
"Never; the bank wouldn't let him have it."
"The bank didn't; he got it on his watch."
"On the watch that's—mending?"
The truth flashed across him before the words were out. Arabella nodded
her head, and her brother bowed his in trouble.
"Yes, that's bad," said he, as though nothing else had been. "There's no
denying it, that is bad." It was a thing he could realise; that was why he took it
thus disproportionately to heart.
"Surely it is all bad together!" said Arabella. John William spent some
minutes in a study of the bare boards by his bedside.
"Where do you think she went to?" he said at last, looking up.
"I have no idea."
"Have you told me all that she said? She didn't—she didn't send any other
messages?" It was wistfully asked.
"No, none; but she did tell me how she hopes and prays that you will never
give her another thought. She declares she has never given a single thought to
you. It is true, too, I am sure."
"We shall see—we shall see. So you have no idea where she went? She
gave you no hint of any sort or kind?"
"None whatever."
"She has gone back to Melbourne, think you?"
"I don't know where else she could go to."
"No more do I," said John William, rising from the bed at last. He opened
the window softly and looked out into the night. "No more do I see where else
she could go to," he whispered over again. Then he turned round to Arabella.
She was watching him closely. Neither of them spoke. But John William
picked his wideawake from off the bed and jammed it over his brows. Then he
took a pair of spurs from the drawers-head and dropped them into his coat
pocket. Then he faced Arabella afresh.
 "Do you know what I am going to do?"
"I can guess. You are going to ride into Melbourne and look for Missy."
"I am—and now, at once. I'm going out by that window. Don't shut it,
because I shall be back before milking, and shall come in the same way I get
out."
"But you'll never see her, John William; you'll never see her," said Arabella
in misery. "It'll be like hunting for a needle in a haystack!"
"You may always find the needle—there is always a chance. For me, if half
of what she told you has a word of truth in it I shall have a better chance by
night than by day. It can't be much after eleven now, and I guess I shall do it
to-night in half an hour."
"But if you don't see her?"
"Then I shall have another try to-morrow night—and another the next—
and another the night after that. There are plenty of horses in the paddock;
there are some that haven't been ridden this long time, and some that nobody
can ride but me. The mare will have to sweat for it to-night, but not after to-
night. Only look here. I shall be found out sooner or later, then there will be a
row, and you know who'll make it. You'll let it be later, won't you,'Bella, so far
as you're concerned?"
"You must know that I will!"
"Then bless you, my dear, and good night."
They had seldom kissed since they were little children. They were both of
them over thirty now, in respect of mere years. But with his beard tickling the
woman's cheek, the man whispered, "You said that she had done something for
you, too, you know!"
And the woman answered, "Something more than I can ever tell any of
you. You little know what I might have come to, but for Missy. Yet what are
you to do with her, poor Jack, if you do find her?"
And the man said, "Make her good again, so help me God!"

CHAPTER XVII.—THE TWO MIRIAMS.

A Sunday morning early in the following February; in fact, the first Sunday
of the month.
It was, perhaps, the freshest and coolest morning of any kind that the hot
young year had as yet brought forth. Nevertheless, neither Mr. nor Mrs.
Teesdale had gone to chapel, as was their wont. For this Sabbath day was also
one requiring a red letter in the calendar of the Teesdales, insomuch as it was
the solitary entire day which a greatly honoured visitor over the week-end had
consented, after much ill-bred importuning, to give to her father's old friends
at the farm.
The visitor was gone to chapel with Arabella. But the farmer and his wife
had stayed at home, the one to shoot a hare, and the other to cook it for the
very special Sunday dinner which the occasion demanded.
Naturally David's part was soon performed, because the old man was so
good a shot still, and there were plenty of hares about the place. It was less
natural in one of his serene disposition to light a pipe afterwards and sit down
in the verandah expressly and deliberately to think of things which could only
trouble him. This, however, was what he proceeded to do. And the things
troubled him more and more the longer he allowed his mind to dwell upon
them.
One thing was the whole miserable episode of Missy, of whom the old man
could not possibly help thinking, in that verandah.
Another was the manner and bearing of the proper Miriam, which was of
the kind to make simple homely folks feel small and awkward.
A third thing was the difference between the two Miriams.
"She is not like her mother, and she certainly is not like her father—not as
I knew him," muttered David with reference to the real one. "But she's exactly
like her portrait in yon group. Put her in the sun, and you see it in a minute.
She frowns just like that still. She has much the same expression whenever she
isn't speaking to you or you aren't speaking to her. It isn't a kind expression,
and I wish I never saw it. I wish it was more like——"
He ceased thinking so smoothly, for as a stone stars a pane of glass, that
had shot into his mind's eye which made cross-roads of his thoughts. He took
one of the roads and sat pulling at his pipe. Here from the verandah there was
no view to be had of the river-timber and the distant ranges so beloved of the
old man's gaze. But his eyes wandered down the paddock in front of the
farmhouse, and thence to the township roofs, shifting from one to another of
such as shone salient in the morning sun, and finally running up the parched
and yellow hill upon the farther side. That way lay Melbourne, nine or ten
miles to the south. And on this hill-top, between withered grass and dark blue
sky, the old eyes rested; and the old lips kept clouding with tobacco-smoke the
bit of striking sky-line, for the satisfaction of seeing it break through the cloud
next instant; while on the worn face the passing flicker of a smile only showed
the shadow of pain that was there all the time, until at length no more smoke
came to soften the garish brilliance of the southern sky.
Then David lowered his eyes and knocked the ashes out of his pipe. And
presently he sighed a few syllables aloud:
"Ay, Missy! Poor thing! Poor girl!"
For on the top of that hill, between grass and sky, between puff and puff
from his own pipe, a mammoth Missy had appeared in a vision to David
Teesdale. Nor was it one Missy, but a whole set of her in a perfect sequence of
visions. And this sort of thing was happening to the old man every day.
There was some reason for it. With all her badness the girl had certainly
shown David personally a number of small attentions such as he had never
experienced at any hands but hers. She had filled his pipe, and fetched his
slippers, and taken his arm whenever they chanced to be side by side for half a
dozen steps. His own daughter never dreamt of such things, unless asked to do
them, which was rare. But Missy had done them continually and of her own
accord. She had taken it into her own head to read to the old man every day;
she had listened to anything and all things he had to say to her, as Arabella had
never listened in her life. Not that the daughter was at all uncommon in this
respect; the wife was just the same. The real Miriam, too, showed plainly
enough to a sensitive eye that poor David's conversation interested her not in
the least. So it was only Missy who was uncommon—in caring for anything
that he had to say. And this led Mr. Teesdale to remember the little good in
her, and doubtless to exaggerate it, without thinking of the enormous evil;
even so that when he did remember everything the old man, for one, was still
unable to think of the impostor without a certain lingering tenderness.
There kept continually recurring to him things that she had said, her way of
saying them, the tones of her voice, the complete look and sound of her in
sundry little scenes that had actually taken place during her stay at the farm.
Two such had been played all over again between the smoke of his pipe, the
rim of yellow grass, and the background of blue sky which had formed the
theatre of his thoughts. One of the two was the occasion of Missy's first blood-
shedding with John William's gun. David recalled her sudden coming round
the corner of the house—this corner. A whirlwind in a white dress, the flush of
haste upon her face, the light of triumph in her eyes, the trail of the wind about
her disorderly red hair. So had she come to him and thrown her victim at his
feet as he sat where he was sitting now. And in a trice he had taken the
triumph out of her by telling her what it was that she had shot, and why she
ought not to have shot it at all. He could still see the look in her face as she
gazed at her dead handiwork in the light of those candid remarks: first it was
merely crestfallen, then it was ashamed, as her excitement subsided and she
realised that she had done a cruel thing at best. She was not naturally cruel—a
thousand trifles had proved her to be the very reverse. Her heart might be
black by reason of her life, but by nature it was soft and kind. Kindness was
something! It made up for some things, too.
Thus David would console himself, fetching his consolation from as far as
you please. But even he could extract scant comfort from the other little
incident which had come into his head. This was when Missy drank off Old
Willie's whisky without the flicker of an eyelid; there has hitherto been no
occasion to mention the matter, which was not more startling than many others
which happened about the same time. Suffice it now to explain that Mr.
Teesdale was in the habit of mixing every evening, and setting in safety on the
kitchen mantelpiece, a pannikin of grog for Old Willie, who started townwards
with the milk at two o'clock every morning. One fine evening Missy happened
to see David prepare this potion, and asked what it was, getting as answer,
"Old Willie's medicine;" whereupon the girl took it up, smelt it, and drank it
off before the horrified old gentleman had time to interfere. "It's whisky!" he
gasped. "Good whisky, too," replied Missy, smacking her lips. "But it was a
stiff dose—I make it stiff so as to keep Old Willie from wanting any at the
other end. You'd better be off to bed, Missy, before it makes you feel queer."
"Queer!" cried Missy. "One tot like that! Do you suppose I've never tasted
whisky before?" And indeed she behaved a little better than usual during the
remainder of the evening.
That alone should have aroused his suspicions—so David felt now. But at
the time he had told nobody a word about the trick, and had passed it over in
his own mind as one of the many "habits and ways which were not the habits
and ways of young girls in our day." Their name had indeed been legion as
applied to the perjured pretender; that sentence in Mr. Oliver's letter, like the
remark about "modern mannerisms," was fatally appropriate to her. Remained
the question, how could those premonitory touches apply to a young lady so
cultivated and so superior as the real Miriam Oliver?
It was a question which Mr. Teesdale found very difficult to answer; it was
a question which was driven to the back of his brain, for the time being, by the
return of the superior young lady herself, with Arabella, from the township
chapel.
David jumped up and hurried out to meet them. Miss Oliver wore a look
which he could not read, because it was the look of boredom, with which
David was not familiar. He thought she was tired, and offered her his arm. She
refused it with politeness and a perfunctory smile.
"I'm afraid you've had a very hot walk," said the old man. "Who preached,
Arabella?"
 "Mr. Appleton. Miss Oliver didn't think——"
"Ah! I thought he would!" cried David with enthusiasm. "We're very proud
of Mr. Appleton's sermons. It will be interesting to hear how he strikes a
young lady——"
"She didn't think much of him," Arabella went on to state with impersonal
candour.
"Nay, come!" And Mr. Teesdale looked for contradiction to the young lady
herself; but though the latter raised her eyebrows at Arabella's way of putting
it, she did not mince matters in the least. Perhaps this was one of those ways or
habits.
"It was better than I expected," she said, with a small and languid smile.
"But didn't you like our minister, Miss Oliver? We all think so highly of
him."
"Oh, I am sure he is an excellent man, and what he said seemed extremely
well meant; but one has heard all that before, over and over again, and rather
better put."
"Ah, at Home, no doubt. Yes; I suppose you would now, in London.
However," added David, throwing up his chin in an attempt to look less
snubbed than he felt as they came into the verandah, "as long as you don't
regret having gone! That's the main thing—not the sermon. The prayers and
the worship are of much more account, and I knew you'd enjoy them. Take this
chair, Miss Oliver, and get cooled a bit before you go inside."
Miss Oliver stopped short of saying what she thought of the prayers,
which, indeed, had been mostly extemporised by the Rev. Mr. Appleton. But
Arabella, had she not gone straight into the house, would have had something
to say on this point, for Miss Oliver had been excessively frank with her on the
way home, and she was nettled. It was odd how none of them save Mrs.
Teesdale (who was not sensitive) thought of calling the real Miriam by her
Christian name. That young lady had refused the chair, but she stood for a
moment taking off her gloves.
"And why didn't you come to chapel, Mr. Teesdale?" she asked, for
something to say, simply.
"Aha!" said David slyly. "That's tellings. I make a rule of going, and it's a
rule I very seldom break; but I'm afraid I broke it this morning—ay, and the
Sabbath itself—I've broken that and all!"
Miss Miriam was a little too visibly unamused, because, with all her
culture, she had omitted to cultivate the kind art of appreciation. She had never
studied the gentle trick of keeping one's companions on good terms with
themselves, and it did not come natural to her. So David was made to feel that
he had said something foolish, and this led him into an unnecessary
explanation.
"You see, in this country, in the hot weather, meat goes bad before you
know where you are." This put up the backs of Miss Oliver's eyebrows to
begin with.
"You can't keep a thing a day, so, if I must tell you, I've been shooting a
hare for our dinners. Mrs. T. is busy cooking it now. You see, if we'd hung it
up even for a couple of hours——"
"Please don't go into particulars," cried Miss Oliver, with a terrible face
and much asperity of tone. "There was no need for you to tell me at all. You
dine late, then, on Sundays?"
"No, early, just as usual; it will be ready by the time you've got your things
off."
"What—the hare that you've only shot since we went out?"
"Why, to be sure."
Miss Oliver went in to take off her things without another word. And
David gathered from his guilty conscience that he had said what he had no call
to say, what it was bad taste to say, what nobody but a very ill-bred old man
would have dreamt of saying; but presently he knew it to his cost.
For nothing would induce the visitor to touch that hare, though Mrs.
Teesdale had cooked it with her own hands. She had to say so herself, but
Miss Miriam steadily shook her head; nor did there appear to be much use in
pressing her. Mrs. Teesdale only made matters worse by so doing. But it is
impossible not to sympathise with Mrs. Teesdale. She was by no means so
strong a woman as her manifold and varied exertions would have led one to
suppose. A hot two hours in the kitchen had left their mark upon her, and
being tired at all events, if not in secret bodily pain, she very quickly became
angry also. There was, in fact, every prospect of a scene, when David
interposed and took the entire blame for having divulged to Miss Oliver the all
too modern history of the hare. Then Mrs. Teesdale was angry, but only with
her husband. With Miriam she proceeded to sympathise from that instant;
indeed, she had set herself to make much of this Miriam from the first; and the
matter ended by the young lady at last overcoming her scruples and
condescending to one minute slice from the middle of the back. But she had
worn throughout these regrettable proceedings a smile, hardly noticeable in
itself, but of peculiarly exasperating qualities, if one did happen to remark it.
And it had not escaped John William, who sat at the table without speaking a
word, feeling, in any case, disinclined to open his mouth before so superior a
being as this young lady from England.
In the heat of the afternoon, however, the younger Teesdale found the elder
in the parlour, alone too, but walking up and down, as if ill at ease; and John
William then had his say.
"Where's everybody?" he asked, putting his head into the room first of all.
Then he entered bodily and shut the door behind him. "Where's our precious
guest?" he cried, in no promising tone.
"She's gone to lie down, and so has——"
"That's all right! I shan't be sorry myself if she goes on lying down for the
rest of the day. I don't know what you think of her, father, but I do know what
I think!"
Mr. Teesdale continued to pace the floor with bent body and badly troubled
face, but he said nothing.
"She's what I told you she would be," proceeded the son, "in the very
beginning. I told you she'd be stuck up—and good Lord, isn't she? I said we
didn't want that kind here, and no more we do. No, I'm dashed if we do! Don't
you remember? It was the time you read us the old man's letter. I liked the
letter and I might like the old man, but I'm dashed if I like his daughter! She
doesn't take after her father, I'll be bound."
"Not unless he is very much changed," admitted David sadly. "Still, I think
you are rather hard upon her, John William."
"Hard upon her! Haven't I been watching her? Haven't I ears and eyes in
my head, like everybody else? It's only one meal I've set down to beside her,
so far, but one 'll do for me! With her nasty supercilious smile, and her no-
thank-you this and no-thank-you that! I never did know anybody take such a
delight in refusing things. Look at her about that hare!"
"Yes; and your mother had spent all morning at it. I'm very much afraid
she's knocked herself up over it, for she's lying down, too. Your mother is not
so strong as she was, John William. I'm very much afraid that matter of Missy
has been preying on her nerves."
"I'd rather have Missy than this here Miriam," said John William, after a
pause, and all at once his voice was full of weariness.
The same thought was in Mr. Teesdale's mind, but he did not give
expression to it. Presently he said, still pacing the room with his long-legged,
weak-kneed stride:
"I wonder what Mr. Oliver meant when he hinted that I should find Miriam
so different from the girls of our day? Where are the tricks and habits that he
alluded to? Poor Missy had plenty, but I can't see any in Miriam."
"Can't you? Then I can. Ways of another kind altogether. Did the girls in
your day turn up their noses at things before people's faces?"
"No."
"Did they sneer when they talked to their elders and betters?"
"No; but we are only Miriam's elders, mind—not her betters."
"Could they smile without looking supercilious, and could they open their
mouths without showing their superiority?"
"Of course they could."
"There you are then! One more question—about Mr. Oliver this time.
When you left the old country he hadn't the position he has now, had he?"
"No, no; very far from it. He was just beginning business, and in a small
way, too. Now he is a very wealthy man."
"Then he hadn't got as good an education as he's been able to give his
children, I reckon?"
"No, you're right. We went to school together, he and I," said Mr. Teesdale
simply.
"Then don't you see?" cried his son, jumping up from the sofa where he
had been sitting, while the old man still walked up and down the room. "Don't
you see, father? Mr. Oliver was warning you against what he himself had
suffered from. You bet that Miss Miriam picks him up, and snubs him and
sneers at him, just as she does with us!"
Which was the cleverest deduction that this unsophisticated young farmer
had ever arrived at in his life; but puzzling constantly over another matter had
lent a new activity to his brain, and much worry had sharpened his wits.
Old Teesdale accepted his son's theory readily enough, but yet sorrowfully,
and the more so because the more he saw of his old friend's child, the less he
liked her.
Indeed, she was not at all an agreeable young person. It appeared that she
had been merely reading in her own room, so when Arabella owned to having
been asleep in hers, she looked duly and consciously superior. There was
something comic about that look of conscious superiority which broke out
upon this young lady's face upon the least provocation, but it is difficult to
give an impression of it in words—it was so slight, and yet so plain. To be
sure, she was the social as well as the intellectual superior of the simple folk at
the farm, but that in itself was not so very much to be proud of, and at any rate
one would not have expected a tolerably well-educated girl to exhale
superiority with every breath. But this was the special weakness of Miss
Miriam Oliver. Even the fact that some of the Teesdales read the Family
Cherub was an opportunity which she could not resist. She took up a number
and satirised the Family Cherub most unmercifully. Then she was queer about
the poor old piano in the best parlour. She played a few bars upon it—she
could play very well—and then jumped up shuddering. Certainly the piano
was terribly out of tune; but not more so than this young Englishwoman's
manners. In conversation with the Teesdales there was only one subject that
really interested her.
It was a subject which had been fully dealt with at supper on the Saturday
night, when Mrs. Teesdale had waxed very warm thereon. Old Teesdale and
Arabella had listened in silence because to them it was not quite such a genial
topic. John William had not been there; the misfortune was that he did sit
down to the Sunday supper, when Miss Oliver brought up this subject again.
"Did my under-study like cocoa, then?" she inquired, having herself
refused to take any, much to Mrs. T.'s discomfiture.
"You mean that impudent baggage?" said the latter. "Ay, she was the
opposite extreme to you, Miriam. She took all she could get, you may be sure!
She made the best use of her time!"
"Do tell me some more about her," said Miss Oliver. "It is most
interesting."
"Nay, I would rather not speak of her," replied Mrs. Teesdale, who was
only too delighted to do so when sure of a sympathetic hearing. "It was the
most impudent piece of wickedness that ever I heard tell of in my life."
"The queer thing to me," remarked Miss Oliver, "is that you ever should
have believed her. Fancy taking such a creature for me! It was scarcely a
compliment, Mrs. Teesdale. A more utterly vulgar person one could hardly
wish to see."
"My dear," began Mr. Teesdale nervously, "she behaved very badly, we
know; yet she had her good points——"
"Hold your tongue, David!" cried his wife, whom nothing incensed more
than a good word for Missy. "She curry-favoured with you, so you try to
whitewash her. I wonder what Miriam will think of you? However, Miriam, I
can tell you that I never believed in her—never once! A brazen, shameless,
lying, thieving hussy, that's what she——"
A heavy fist had banged the table at the lower end, so that every cup
danced in its saucer, and all eyes were turned upon John William, who sat in
his place—trembling a little—very pale—but with eyes that glared alarmingly,
first at his mother, then at the guest.
"What did she steal?" he thundered out. "You may be ashamed of yourself,
mother, trying to make the girl out worse than she was. And you, Miss Oliver
—I wonder you couldn't find something better to talk about—something in
better taste!"
Miss Oliver put up her pale eyebrows.
"This is interesting!" she exclaimed. "To think that one should come here
to learn what is, and what is not good taste! Perhaps you preferred my—my
predecessor to me, Mr. Teesdale?"
"I did so!" said John William stoutly.
"Ah, I thought as much. She was, of course, rather more in your line."
"By the Lord," answered the young man, forgetting himself entirely, "if
you were more in hers it would be the better for them that have to do with you.
She could have taught you common civility, at any rate, and common
kindness, and two or three other common things that you seem never to have
been taught in your life!" There was a moment's complete silence. Then Miss
Oliver got steadily to her feet.
"After that," she said to David, "I think my room is the best place for me—
and the safest too."
She proceeded to the door without let or hindrance. All save herself were
too much startled to speak or to act. Mr. Teesdale was gazing through the gun-
room window with a weary face; his wife held her side as if it were a physical
trouble with her; while Arabella looked in terror at John William, who was
staring unflinchingly at the first woman he had lived to insult. The latter had
reached the threshold, where, however, she turned to leave them something to
keep.
"It serves me right," she said. "I might have known what to expect if I
came here."

CHAPTER XVIII.—THE WAY OF ALL FLESH.

Ay, it's been a bad job," said David. "But it's over and done with now—
that's one thing."
He meant the whole matter, from Mr. Oliver's letter about Miriam to this
young lady's ultimate depressing visit; but in his heart he was thinking more of
things and a person that came in between; and he glanced in wonder at his
wife, who for once had missed an opening to loosen her lips and rail at that
person and those things.
They were driving into Melbourne, the old couple together, and such a
thing was rare. Moreover, the proposal had been Mrs. Teesdale's, which was
rarer still. But rarest of all was her reason, namely, that there were several little
odds and ends which she wanted to buy for herself. They had been married
thirty-five years, but she had never been known deliberately to buy herself any
odds or ends before.
"Fallals?" said David chuckling.
"No such thing; you know nothing about it, David."
"Ribbons?"
"Rubbish," said Mrs. Teesdale; and David looked at her again, for there
was no edge on the word, and, after thirty-five years, there was a something in
the woman which was new and puzzling to the man.
What was it? A week and more had passed since Miriam Oliver left them,
with undisguised relief in her eyes and the coldest of cold farewells upon her
lips, which not even Mrs. Teesdale, who half attempted it, was allowed to kiss
in memory of her parents. Since that day Mrs. T. had not been herself; but
David was only now beginning to perceive it. When one has lived thirty-five
years with another the master-spirit of the pair, it must be hard indeed for the
weaker to discern the first false ring, telling of the first flaw in the stronger
vessel. And the weaker vessel need not necessarily be the woman, that is the
worst of it; in the Teesdales' case it was certainly plain enough which, was
which. So the feeble and indolent old man was slow to see infirmity in the
active, energetic body, his wife; indeed, the infirmity did not show itself as
such quite immediately. It came out first of all in snapping and storming, in
continual irritation, culminating in furies as insane as the rage of babes and
sucklings. In this stage she would take and tear the unforgotten Missy into
little pieces when other irritating matter chanced to flag; and once boxed
Arabella's ears for daring to hint that the ways of the genuine Miriam were
themselves not absolutely perfect. The name of Missy, whom she could not
abuse too roundly, had the excellent effect upon her of taking off the steam;
that of Miriam caused certain explosion, because for her Mrs. Teesdale would
stick up with her lips while resenting most bitterly in her secret heart every
remembered word and look of this young lady. The memory of both girls was
gall and wormwood to her. There was only this difference, that she lost her
temper in defending Miriam, and found it again in reviling Missy. But now,
after not many days, that temper was much less readily lost and found; the
sharpness was gone from the tongue to the face; all at once the woman was
grown old; and he who had aged before her, though by her side, was the last to
realise that she had caught him up.
She could milk no longer. One afternoon she got up from her stool with a
very white face and left the shed, walking unsteadily. She never went back to
it. She had ceased to be a wonderful woman. It was the very next day that she
made David drive her into Melbourne to buy those little odds and ends.
On the way, in the buggy, under a merciless sun, the husband, looking
often at his wife, saw at last what manner of changes had taken place. They
were outward and visible; they made her look old and ill. It was the worry of
recent events, no more, no less. David had been worried himself, he truly said;
but there was no sense in anybody's worrying any more about what couldn't be
helped, being over and done with, for good and all.
"It's been a bad job," he said again before they got to Melbourne; "a very
bad job, as it is. If you let it make you ill, my dear, with thinking about what
can't be mended, it'll be a worse job than ever."
He wanted to accompany Mrs. T. upon her unwonted little flutter among
the shops. They had put up the mare at their old servant's inn. The landlord
had remarked of his former mistress, and to her face, that she was not looking
at all well, but, in fact, very poorly. And as David now thought the same, he
was very anxious indeed to go with her and hold the odds while she bought the
ends. She would not hear of it; but instead of sharply ordering, she entreated
him to mind his own business and stay at the inn; so he stayed there,
marvelling, for a time. Then a thought struck him.
He went to the pawnbroker's and saw his watch. It was all right. He had it
in his hands, and wound it up, and set it right, and listened to its tick as to the
beating of some loving heart, while his own went loud and quick with
emotion. Then he left, and wandered along the street with eyes that were
absent and distraught until they rested for a moment upon a passing face full
of misery. He looked again—it was his wife.
They met with a mutual guilty start—hers the guiltier of the two—so that
all the questioning came from him.
"Where have you been, my dear?"
"Collins Street."
"And what have you bought, and where is it?"
"Nowhere; I've bought nothing at all. I—I couldn't find what I wanted."
"Not find what you wanted? Not in Melbourne? Nonsense, my dear!
You've been to the wrong places; you must take me with you after all. What
was it that you wanted most particularly?"
 "Nothing, David; I want nothing now. I only want to go home to the farm
—only home now, David. There were little things, but—but I couldn't get 'em,
and now they don't matter. I am disappointed, but that doesn't matter either.
Yes, I am disappointed; but now I only want to get home—to get home!"
She was so disappointed, this tough old woman with the weather-beaten
face that was now and suddenly so aged and haggard, that her eyes were full
of tears even there in the street; and she let them run over when David forged
ahead to push the way; and wiped them up before she took his arm again. This
taking of his arm, too, was done more tenderly, more dependently, than ever,
perhaps, in their married life before. And David must have felt this himself,
for he held up his head and shouldered his way through the crowd like a very
brave old gentleman, and drove back to the farm for once the lord and master
of his wife—he who had quitted it with less authority than their children.
He was not, of course, exactly aware of it He was conscious of something,
but not so much as all that. He did not know enough to keep him awake that
night. But the window-blind took shape out of the darkness, and the wife at
David's side saw it with eyes that had never closed. And the gray dawn filled
the room: and daylight whitened the face and beard of the sleeping man: and
the wife at his side raised herself in the bed and looked long upon David, and
wept, and kissed the bedclothes where they covered him, because she was
frightened of his waking if she kissed him. But he went on sleeping like a
child.
Then Mrs. Teesdale lay back and stared at the ceiling, thinking hard. She
thought of their long married life together; and had she been a good wife to
David? She thought of the easy-going, sweet-tempered young man who had
made laughing love to her long ago in some Yorkshire lane; of the middle-
aged philosopher who had found it rather amusing than otherwise to watch
worse men making their fortunes while he stood still and chuckled; of the frail,
white-haired sleeper who would presently awake with a smile to one day more
of indolence and unsuccess. She still envied that sweet temperament, as she
had envied it when a girl, though she knew now what no girl could have
dreamt, that two such natures linked together would have found themselves
hand in hand at the poor-house door in very much shorter time than thirty-five
years. He had had no vices, this poor dear David of hers. Neither drink nor
cards, nor the racecourse, nor another woman, had ever tempted him from
their own hearthstone, which was the place he had loved best through all the
years. Through all the years he had never spoken a harsh word to wife or
child. He was full of affection and incapable of unkindness; but he was equally
incapable of making a strong man's way in the world. Therefore she had
played the man's part, which had been thrust upon her; and if this had
hardened her could she help it? Was it not natural? Hard labour hardens not
the hands alone, but the mind, the eye, the face, the tongue, and the heart most
of all. It had hardened her; she realised that now, when the strength was gone
out of her, and she at last knew what it was to feel soft, and weak, and to need
the support which she had hitherto given.
She tried to be just, however. Perhaps the support had not been all on her
side through all the years. Perhaps with his even-minded placidity, his
unfailing philosophy, David had all along done very nearly as much for her as
she for him. Certainly he had never complained, and the life they had led
would have been impossible with a complaining man. In their greatest straits
he had stood up to her with a smile and a kiss; he had never depressed her with
his own depression. That kiss and smile might have seemed impertinent to her
at the time, in the actual circumstances, but now she knew how they had
helped her by freeing her mind of special care on his account. So after all he
had been a good husband to her; nay, the very best; for what other would have
borne with her temper as he had done? What other would have been as calm,
and kind, and contented? But he was not fit to be by himself. That was the
dreadful part of it. He was not fit to be left alone.
To be sure, there were the children. They were still children to their
mother, and young children, too; their minds seemed to have grown no older
for so many years. Their mother saw the possibility of their marrying one day
—as though that day might not have come any time those ten years and more.
She saw it still; and what would become of David then? Arabella would not so
much matter; she was just such another as her poor father; but John William
——
Here Mrs. Teesdale's thoughts left the main track for a very ugly turning
indeed. She had taken this turning once or twice before, but it was so ugly that
she had never followed it very far. Now, however, she followed it until not
another moment could she lie in bed, but must jump up and speak to her son
with the matter hot in her head.
It was quite late enough. She was going out a-milking no more, either
morning or evening, and that was another thing which John William must be
told. Mrs. Teesdale, like everybody else, was glad to have more things than
one to speak about, when the one was so difficult, and even dangerous. She
partially dressed, and left the room as quietly as possible. The first gray light
was penetrating into the passage as she stole along it. When she reached John
William's door, there was a noise within; when she opened it, she stood like a
rock on the threshold—because she had been a plucky woman all her life—
and a man was in the act of getting in by the window.
His middle was across the sill, and the crown of his hat was presented to
the door.
 "Who are you," said Mrs. Teesdale sternly, "and what do you want?"
The man raised his head instantly; and it was John William himself.
"Holloa, mother!"
"Where have you been?" said Mrs. Teesdale.
"I didn't want to wake you before your time, so I thought I'd come in like
this. That's better!"
He landed lightly on the floor; but his feet jingled; he was spurred as well
as booted, and dressed, moreover, in his drab tweed suit.
"Where have you been?" said Mrs. Teesdale.
His bed had not been slept in.
"Been? There was something I had to do. No time during the day. So I've
just got it done before——"
"Where have you been?" said Mrs. Teesdale.
The young man stared. His mother had repeated the question thrice, each
time in exactly the same tone, without raising her voice or moving a muscle as
she stood on the threshold, with the brass door-handle still between her
fingers.
"What business is it of yours, mother?" he said sullenly. "Surely to
goodness I'm old enough to do what I like? I'm not what you'd exactly call a
boy."
"You are my boy. Where have you been?"
"In Melbourne—since you so very much want to know."
He had lost patience, and adopted defiance.
"I was sure of it," said Mrs. Teesdale, coming into the room now, and
quietly shutting the door behind her. "I was sure of it."
Then, very slowly and deliberately, she raised her left arm, until one lean
finger pointed to the wall at his left, and through that wall, as it were, into the
room which had been occupied by each of the two visitors. Her eyes flashed
into her son's. The lean finger trembled. But she said no word.
"What does that mean?" he asked at last, with an uneasy laugh.
"You have been—with—that woman!"
"I wish I had," said John William.
"You have!" cried his mother.
 "I have not. With her? Why, I haven't set eyes on her since the day you
took and—the day she left us," said the angered man, ending quietly. "Then
what have you been doing?"
"I have been looking for her."
"For that woman?"
"Yes."
"Looking in Melbourne?"
"Yes."
"In the streets?—in the streets?"
"Yes."
"And you have never seen her since——"
"Never."
"But this isn't the first time! You've been looking night after night! So
that's why you ran up them other horses? That's why you're half dead unless
you get some sleep of afternoons?"
"Mother," he said, "it is."
"Oh, my God!" cried Mrs. Teesdale, reeling, and breaking down very
suddenly. "Oh, my God!"
In an instant strong arms were round her; but she would not have them; she
freed herself and sat down on the chair that was by the bedside, warding him
off with one hand while with the other she covered her face. It cut him to the
heart to hear her sobs; to note the tears trickling through the old fingers,
gnarled and knotted by a long life of hard work; to see the light strong frame,
that had seemed all bone and muscle, like a hawk, so shaken. But because of
her other hand, which forbade him to touch her, he could only stand aloof with
his beard upon his chest and his thick arms folded. At length she calmed
herself; and sat looking up at him with both hands in her lap. Her poor feet
were bare; he had snatched a pillow from the bed and pushed it under them
while she was still beside herself; and now, when she saw what he had done,
she looked at him more kindly; and when she spoke, her voice was softer than
ever he had heard it, boy or man.
"John William, you must give this up."
"Mother, we shall break each other's hearts, you and I. I cannot—I
cannot!"
"But I know you will. You will give up looking for that girl; you will
promise me this before I leave the room. Why should you look for her? How
can you expect to find her? You don't know that she is in Melbourne at all.
Why should you think of her——"
"Because I've got to think of her, as long as I've a head on my shoulders
and a heart in my body."
Mrs. Teesdale had her woman's quick instincts, after all. Hence her very
singular omission, on this occasion, to apply a single hard name to the enemy
whose deadliest thrust of all was only now coming home to her.
"Very well," she said; "but you must promise to give up looking for her in
Melbourne, by night or by day, at any rate while your mother is alive."
"It is all that I can do! It is the only chance!" cried the young man,
miserably. "Why should I promise to give up my one chance——"
"Only while I live," interposed the mother.
"But why should I?"
"Because I shall not live very long. Don't look like that—listen to me. I
have been ailing for months; never mind how. Whether it was the worry of
lately, or what it was, I don't know; but it's only this last week or two that I've
felt too poorly to bide it any longer. I never said a word to anybody—I
wouldn't have said a word to you—not this morning, but now I must. And you
are not to say a word to anybody—least of all to your father—till I give you
leave. But the night before last I felt like dying where I sat milking; so I made
your father take me into Melbourne, to buy some odds and ends. So I told him,
poor man. But a doctor's opinion was all I wanted; that was my odds and ends.
And I got it! No, let me tell you first; I went to Dr. James Murray, in Collins
Street East. I had heard of him. So I went to him for the worst; but I never
thought it would be the very worst; and it was—it was!"
There was an interruption here.
"My boy! Nay you mustn't fret; I'm sixty-three come August, and it's not a
bad age isn't that. I may see August, he says. He says I may live a good few
months yet. Nay, never mind what it is that's the matter with me; you'll know
soon enough. He says he'll come and see me for nothing. It's an interesting
case, he says; wanted me to go into a hospital and be under his eye, he did But
that I wouldn't, so he thinks he must come and see me. Nay, never mind—
never mind! Only promise not to look for that girl—any more—till I am
gone."
The promise was given. John William had long been kneeling at his
mother's feet, and kissing her hands, her face, her neck, her eyes. That was the
interruption which had taken place. Now he was crying like a child.
 Mr. Teesdale awoke as his wife reopened their bedroom door.
"My dear," said he, sweetly, "you've been going about with bare feet!
You'll be catching your death of cold!"
He was not to be told just yet; and because Mrs. Teesdale's eyes were full
of tears, which he must not see, she made answer in her very sharpest manner.
"Mind your own business, and go to sleep again, do!"
David only smiled.
"All right, my dear, you know best. But if you did catch your death o' cold,
it'd be a bad job for the lot of us; it'd be the worst job of all, would that!"

CHAPTER XIX.—TO THE TUNE OF RAIN.

Towards the close of a depressing afternoon in the following winter

Arabella might have been seen (but barely heard) to steal out of the farmhouse
by the front door, which she shut very softly behind her. Twilight had set in
before its time, thanks to the ponderous clouds that were gathered and still
gathering overhead; but as she came forth into the open air, Arabella blinked,
like one accustomed to no light at all. Rain had fallen freely during the day,
but only, it seemed certain, as a foretaste of what was presently to come. At
the moment all was very still, which rendered it the more difficult to make no
noise; but this time Arabella was not bound upon any secret or private
enterprise. She stepped out naturally enough when a few yards from the house,
her simple object being a breath of fresh air; and from her white face and tired
eyes, of this she was in urgent need. She picked her way as quickly as possible
across the muddy yard, but ere she reached the gate was accosted by Old
Willie, who was off duty until milk-cart time in the small hours, and who
peered at her with a grave, inquiring look before opening his mouth.
"About the same, Miss?"
She shook her head.
"No better, at any rate; if anything, worse."
"And Mr. Teesdale?"
"He is keeping up. The woman who is helping me to nurse has a baby. She
had to bring it with her. Father plays with it all day, and it seems to occupy his
mind."
"Well, that's something. Now get your snack of air, miss. I mustn't keep
you."
"No, you mustn't. I am going to the Cultivation, it is so high and open
there. Do you think it will rain before I can get back?"
Old Willie looked aloft. He was an ancient mariner, who had deserted his
ship for the diggings in the early days; hence the aptitude for regular night-
work.
"I think we shall catch it before pitch-dark," said he; "so you'd better look
sharp, miss; and—good-night!"
"Good-night; and thank you—thank you."
But Arabella walked away wincing, and she opened the gate with her left
hand; for the horny-fisted old sea-dog had shown his sympathy by nearly
breaking her right.
It was the gate that led one among the gum-trees, down into that shallow
gully, and so upward to the Cultivation. The trees were as leafy as ever in
summer-time; the grass at their feet was much greener. There was no other
striking difference to mark the exchange of seasons, saving always the heavy
gray sky and the damp raw air. Arabella drew her shawl skin-tight about her
shoulders, and walked rapidly; but far swifter than her feet went her thoughts
—to last summer.
Heaven knows there were others to think of first—and last—just then. Yet
in a minute or two Arabella was thinking only of the wicked, the dishonest, the
immoral Missy. Nothing was known of her at the farm from the day she left it.
That was nearly eight months ago, and eight months was time enough, surely,
to forget her in; but here, of all places, Arabella could never forget the woman
who had saved her own woman's honour. Here it had happened. It was at the
Cultivation corner that she had made the tryst that would infallibly have been
her ruin; it was somewhere hereabouts that Missy had kept that tryst for her
and saved her from ruin. She could never come this way without thinking only
of Missy, and wondering whether she was alive, and where she was, and what
doing. Therefore that which happened this evening was in reality less of a
coincidence than it looked.
The girl of whom she was thinking stood suddenly in Arabella's path.
The recognition, however, was not so immediate. Missy was clad in
garments that were the meanest rags compared even with those in which she
had first appeared at the farm; also, she was thin to emaciation, and not a
strand of her distinguishing red hair could be seen for the unsightly bonnet
which was tightly fastened over her head and ears. Consider, further, the light,
and you will have more patience than Missy had with the dumbfounded
Arabella.
"Don't you know me, 'Bella, or won't you know me?"
Arabella did know her then, and her hands flew out to the other's and
caught them tight. Then she doubted her knowledge—the hands were harder
than her own.
"Missy! No, I don't believe it is you. Where's your fringe? Why are you—
like this? How can it be you? You never used to have hard hands!" Yet she
held them tight.
"Don't talk so loud," said Missy, nervously; "there might be someone
about. You know it's me. I wonder how you can bear to touch me!"
"I can bear a bit more than that," said Arabella warmly, and she flung her
arms about the other, and reached up and kissed her lovingly upon the mouth,
upon both cheeks. The cheeks were cold, and the back and shoulders were wet
to the hands and wrists encircling them.
"You're a good sort, 'Bella," murmured Missy, not particularly touched, but
in a grateful tone enough. "You always were. There, that'll do. Fancy you not
even being choked off yet—and me like this!"
"Fancy you being back again, Missy! That's the grand thing. I can hardly
credit it even now. But you're terribly wet, poor dear! It's dreadful for you,
Missy, it is indeed!"
"Oh, that's nothing; it did rain pretty hard, but there'll be some more in a
minute, so it would come to the same thing in any case."
"Then you have walked, and were caught in it on the road?"
"Do I look as if I'd ridden? Yes, and it was a pretty long road——"
"From Melbourne?—I should think it was." Missy laughed.
"From Melbourne, that's no distance. I've travelled more than twice as far
since morning, my dear, and I shall have it to travel all over again before to-
morrow morning."
"Then you haven't come from Melbourne?" cried Arabella, highly amazed.
"Haven't set foot in it since I saw you last."
"Where in the world have you been, then, Missy?"
But even as they were speaking, the grass whispered on every hand, the
leaves rustled, and down came the rain in torrents. Arabella found herself
taken by the arm and led into the shelter of the nearest tree—a spreading she-
oak. She was much agitated.
 "Oh, what am I to do?" she cried. "I dare not stay many minutes; but I
would give anything to stay ever so long, Missy! You don't understand. Tell
me quickly where you have been, if you never went back to Melbourne?"
"Nay, if you're in a hurry, it's you that must tell me things. That's what I've
come all this way for, 'Bella—just to hear how you're all getting on. How's Mr.
Teesdale?"
"He's as well as he ever is."
"And you, 'Bella?"
"Oh, there's never anything the matter with me."
"And John William?"
"There's not much the matter with him, either."
"Then that's all right," Missy fetched a sigh of relief.
It struck Arabella as very odd indeed that the only one of them after whom
Missy did not ask should be Mrs. Teesdale. But was it odd? Quite apart from
any rights or wrongs, Mrs. Teesdale had been Missy's natural enemy from the
first. Moreover, she had struck Missy as an old woman who would never grow
older or die; and Arabella let it pass. She was in a hurry, and it was now her
turn to get answers from Missy.
"Where have you been," she repeated, "if you never went back to
Melbourne? Be quick and tell me all about it."
Missy shook her head, shaking the rain that had gathered upon her shabby
bonnet into Arabella's eyes. It was raining very heavily all this time, and the
she-oak's shelter left much to be desired. But Missy was now the one with her
arms about the other, who was, as we know, a much shorter woman; so that
Arabella, whose back was to the tree-trunk, was being kept wonderfully dry.
Missy shook her head.
"I can't tell you much if I'm to tell you quickly. You are in a hurry, I can
see, and indeed it's no wonder——-"
"Oh, you don't understand, Missy!" cried the other in a torment. "If only
you would come into the house——"
"That I never can."
"I tell you that you don't understand. You could—just now."
"Never," said Missy firmly. "I know my sins pretty well by this time. I've
had time to study 'em lately; and the worst of the lot was how I played it upon
all of you here. Now don't you begin! You want to know where I've been lying
low all this while, and what I've been doing. I'll tell you in two twos; then I'll
give you what I've got for Mr. Teesdale, and then you shall run away indoors,
and back I go to the place I come from. Where's that? Over twenty miles away,
in the Dandenong Ranges. It's a farm like this—What am I saying? There
never was or will be a farm like this! But it isn't so unlike, either, in this and
that; and I'm the girl in the kitchen there, same as Mary Jane is here, and help
milk the cows, and cook the dinner, and clean up the place, and all that."
"Oh, Missy, I can scarcely believe it! Yet I felt hard work on your hands
the moment I touched them—they are as rough and hard as Mary Jane's," said
Arabella, taking fresh hold of them, "and your dress is just like hers. Where
did you get such a dress? And how did you come to get taken on at the farm?
We all thought you'd gone straight back to Melbourne; as for John William
——"
She hesitated. It was one thing to befriend Missy; but Arabella could not
help taking a special and a different view of her in relation to her own brother.
"Yes?" said Missy.
"John William was quite sure of it."
"Then—I suppose—he never thought of looking for me? No, of course he
wouldn't. Why should he?"
"You—you could hardly expect it, dear, I think," said John William's sister,
very gently.
"Hardly; what a cracked thing it was to say!" cried Missy, laughing down
the wistful tone into which she had dropped. "But you none of you could have
guessed much about my life there, if you thought I was likely to go straight
back to Melbourne from here. No, and you can't have known what it was to
me to have lived here for two months, even as a cheat and a liar. There's worse
things than cheating and lying, 'Bella; there's things that cheating and lying's a
healthy change after! But never mind all that. When I left you, and had got
through the township, I didn't take the road to Melbourne at all; I took the
other road. Bang ahead of me was them Dandenong Ranges that your dear old
father's always looking at as he sits at the table. I wonder does he look at 'em
as much as ever? So I said, 'Them ranges is the place for me;' and I stumped
for them ranges straight away. I swopped dresses with a woman I met on the
road; this is the rags of what I got for mine; and then I stopped at all the farms
asking for work. How I got work, after ever so long, and all about it, I'd tell
you if you weren't in such a hurry to go. You'll get wet, you know, and here
you're as dry as a bone. But I suppose it's only natural!"
"It isn't natural, Missy, and it isn't true," said Arabella, earnestly. "Oh, if
only you understood everything! As if I could ever forget what you did for me
—in this very paddock!"
 "It was under this very tree, for that matter," said Missy, with a laugh. "I
found it easily enough, and I was standing under it for old acquaintance when
you came along. Do you know what he got?"
Arabella hung her head, because in the Argus she had read his sentence, to
whom once she had been prepared to commit body and soul. She did not
answer; but in her anxiety to be good to Missy, she forgot that other anxiety
concerning her brother.
"If only you would come into the house, and let me give you some dry
things and some supper! You must need both; and you have no idea how clear
the coast is. You don't understand!"
"What is it that I don't understand?" asked Missy, pertinently. "You keep on
saying that."
"It is my mother—you never asked after her. She is very ill. She is—on her
deathbed."
For more than a minute Missy remained speechless, while the fall of the
rain on leaf and blade seemed all at once to have grown very loud. Then she
shook her head firmly.
"I am so sorry for you all; but it's all the more reason why I mustn't come
in. If she were well, I daren't."
They argued the matter. The want of food was admitted; that of dry
clothes, obvious.
"If you would only come as far as the cart-shed; there's not the least chance
of anyone going there till Old Willie does at two o'clock in the morning; and
there I could bring you some supper and a change as well. If you would only
do that," Arabella urged, "it would be something."
"You would promise not to tell a soul?"
"I do promise."
"Not even John William?"
Arabella remembered her forgotten anxiety. "Certainly not John William,"
said she, emphatically. And Missy gave in at last.
Five minutes later they stood, wet and dripping, in the cart-shed. It was one
of the many more or less ramshackle shanties which stood around the
homestead yard. It had a galvanised iron roof, a back and two sides of wattle
and dab, and no front at all. And no sooner had the two women gained this
shelter than a man's voice calling through the rain caused them to cling
instinctively together. The man was John William, and, low as his voice was
purposely pitched, the words carried clear and clean into the cart-shed.
 "'Bella! 'Bella! Where are you, 'Bella?"
And the voice was coming nearer.
"I must go," whispered 'Bella.
"Remember your promise!"
Missy could not know how superfluous was her caution; it comforted her
to remember that she had given it, now that she was left alone, able to think,
and to examine the situation. This was not that situation which she had
planned and bargained for in her own mind; this was the better of the two. She
had intended to waylay Arabella, but she had never hoped to manage it so far
from the house. She had contemplated the impossibility of waylaying her at all
—the necessity of knocking at her window as she was going to bed—the
circumstances of a more difficult and a more dangerous interview than that
which had already taken place. She knew the daily ways of the farm well
enough to know also that she was tolerably safe at present where she was.
Soon Arabella would return with eatables and dry clothing, and the one would
be as welcome as the other. Meantime, Missy had hidden herself under the
spring-cart, lest by any chance another should look into the shed before
Arabella. When the latter came back, she would confide into her safe keeping
that which she had brought for Mr. Teesdale, to be given him not before Missy
had been twenty-four hours gone from the premises. And after that——
Nothing mattered after that.
But Arabella did not return so very soon, after all; and it was
uncomfortable for body and nerves alike, crouching under the spring-cart; and
the rain made such an uproar on the iron roof that it would be impossible to
hear footsteps outside, came they never so near; and this made it worse still for
the nerves.
The cow-shed was not far from that which sheltered buggy and carts and
Missy in the midst of them. On a perfectly still evening it would have been
possible to hear the jet of milk playing on the side of the pail; but to-night
Missy could hear nothing but the rain and her own heart beating. It was
raining harder than ever. She crouched, watching the sputtering blackness
outside until, very suddenly, it ceased to be absolutely black. The light of a
lantern came swinging nearer and nearer to the shed.
"What can she want with a lantern?" thought Missy, shrinking for a
moment as the rays reached her. Then she extricated herself from the spring-
cart wheels, stood upright, and asked the question aloud when the lantern itself
was within a yard or two of the shelter. Now you cannot tell who is carrying
the ordinary lantern when the night is dark and there is no other light at all;
and Missy never dreamt that this was any person but Arabella, until strong
arms encircled her and the breath was out of her body.
At last she gasped—
"Arabella told you! She has broken her sacred promise!"
"No one told me; but I saw it in Arabella's face.... Missy! Missy! To think
that I have got you safe! I shall never let you go any more—never—never!"
Suddenly he swept her off her feet and bore her into the rain.
"Where are you going to take me? Not into the house?"
She could scarcely speak; she was quite past struggling. Without
answering, he bore her on.

CHAPTER XX.—THE LAST ENCOUNTER.

It was in the old parlour, an hour later.

Here the change from summer to winter struck the eye more forcibly than
it ever can out-of-doors in a country where no leaves fall. The gauze screen
which had fitted in front of the fire-place was put away, and a log fire burnt
excellently on the whitened hearth; the room was further lighted by the
kerosene lamp that stood as of old upon the table; the gun-room door was shut;
and a pair of old green curtains, of a different shade from that of the tablecloth,
which looked less green and more faded than ever, were drawn across the
window.
Mr. Teesdale sat in his accustomed corner, with his chair pushed back and
pointing neither towards the table nor the fire, but between the two. On his
knee was a bare-legged child, perhaps fourteen months old. Arabella, when
she was in the room, took a chair near the table, if she sat down at all, and the
lamplight only blackened the inscription of sleepless nights and anxious days
that was cut deep upon her pallid face. John William sat at that end of the sofa
which he had invariably affected, watching Missy; they all did this, even to
Mr. Tees-dale, who was also occupied with the child upon his knee; but all
save the child, who sometimes crowed and was checked, sat more like
waxworks in a show than living, suffering beings.
When one spoke, it was in a whisper. But there was very little speaking. If
Missy had not come back at all they could scarcely have been more silent.
Yet the way they spoke to her when they spoke at all—the way they looked
at her, whether they spoke or not—this was much more remarkable than their
silence, for which there was good reason. They spoke to Missy as to an old
and valued friend, who had come at a cruel time, but who brought her own
welcome even so; they looked at her with hospitable, grieved eyes that
entreated her to take the kindly will for the kindlier deed. Across their faces,
too, there now and then swept looks of apprehension which she did not see;
but never a shade that would have led a stranger to suspect that they knew
aught but good of this girl, or that she had rendered aught but kindness to them
and theirs.
As for Missy, she did not see half their looks, because her own eyes had
been either averted or downcast during the whole of the hour that she had
already spent in the room. Now they were averted. She was sitting on a stool
by the fireside—by that side of the fire which was furthest from Mr. Teesdale
and nearest to the door. Her body was bent forward; her eyes were fixed
pensively upon the fire; her left elbow rested upon her knee, and her chin in
the hollow of her left hand. Hand and face were brown alike from hard work
in all weathers. It was the weather of that day, however, that had quenched the
colour from her hair; limp and soaking as it was, it looked much less red than
formerly in the glare of midsummer. Also the fringe had disappeared entirely;
but this alteration was permanent. Most notable of all changes, however, was
the gauntness and angularity of the old good figure, which had struck Arabella
even in the darkness; it was painfully conspicuous in the light. Missy had been
to her box with Arabella, and was clad in a blouse and skirt that had been
made for her ten months earlier. They fitted but loosely now. A hat and jacket,
which she had also obtained from her box, had been taken away from her by
John William: it lay within reach of his hand upon the sofa, where he appeared
content to sit still and stare fixedly at Missy's back. Thus he was not aware
that she had taken a small roll of papers out of her blouse, and that her right
hand had been for some time fidgeting with it in her lap. And when David,
who had a much better view, broke the silence with a low-toned question, the
younger Teesdale had to get up in order to understand what his father meant.
"What is it you have got there, Missy?"
"It is something that I—I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Teesdale." She
turned her head and looked a little wistfully at John William and Arabella; but
neither of these two perceived that she wished to speak to Mr. Teesdale alone;
and, after all, there was no reason why she should not speak out in front of
them. So she proceeded. "It's something rather important—it's the only thing
that could ever have brought me back here. Mr. Teesdale, you never took
possession of my box after all!"
"'Twasn't likely," said David.
"But I meant you to. I told Arabella——"
"Yes, yes, but you didn't really and truly expect me to take you at your
word, Missy?"
"Of course I did. The box was yours. It and all that was in it had been
bought with your money."
"I wouldn't have anybody touch the box," said David, with characteristic
pride. "I took and locked it up myself, and I've kept the key in my pocket ever
since."
"But it was all yours by rights——"
"I care nothing at all about that!"
"The dresses and things, as well as the box itself, were worth something.
Not much, perhaps—still, something. And then there were four pounds and
some silver which I'd never touched. Here they are—four pounds."
She got up and laid them in a row on the tablecloth under the lamp. The
others had risen also; and John William, for one, had his eyes fixed upon the
little roll of paper in her right hand. It was a roll of one-pound notes. She
began to lay them one by one upon the table, counting aloud as she did so.
"One, two, three, four, five, six—-"
"Stop a moment," said David, trembling. "How did you come by them,
Missy?"
"Seven, eight. Didn't I tell you that I've been working all this time upon a
farm? Nine——"
"Ah, yes, you did."
There had been a few explanations—a very few—when John William had
first brought her in. Then dry clothes, then supper, then silence. It must be
remembered that the shadow of death hung over the farm.
"Ten. I was there thirty-three weeks last Saturday. Eleven. They gave me
ten shillings a week, and they found me—twelve—in food and clothes. I had
things to put up with—thirteen—but nothing I couldn't bear. I was thankful
you'd taught me to milk here. Fourteen, fifteen. I was so! Sixteen, and that's
the lot. Sixteen and four's twenty. Twenty pound I got out of you, Mr. Tees-
dale, because I couldn't resist it when you said what you may recollect saying
as you drove me back into Melbourne that first day. I never meant to pay you
back; I wasn't half sure that I'd ever let you see me again. I don't say I should
have done it if I'd known you'd go and pawn your watch for me; still I did do
you out of the twenty pounds, and I meant to do you out of them for good and
all. But here they are."
"Thank you, Missy," said David at last. The others said nothing at all.
 "Thank me! I don't want you to thank me at all. What have I done but rob
you and pay you back again? No—I only want you—to forgive me—if you
can!"
"I do forgive you, my dear; but I forgave you long ago," said David,
smoothing back her hair and kissing her upon the forehead.
"You two forgive me, I know," she said, turning to the others.
Arabella embraced her tearfully, but John William only laughed
sardonically. What had he to forgive?
"I knew you did. So now there is only one thing more that I want to send
me away happy."
"Send you away! Where to? You've only just come," cried Mr. Teesdale, as
loud as he dared; but even as he spoke he remembered the special difficulty of
the occasion, and his face twitched with the pain. "Why, where did you think
of going to?" he added, wiping his lips with his red pocket-handkerchief.
"Back to the Dandenong Ranges. I'm so happy there, you don't know!
Thought I'd left? Not me, don't you believe it. No, I must get back to my work
as quick as I can. And you'll be able to sit in quietness and look out through
the gun-room window"—she pointed to the gun-room door—"and across the
river-timber to them blue ranges, and you'll be able to say, 'Missy's working
there. She's honest now, whatever she was once; and she's trying to make up
for her whole life.' Yes, and you may say, 'She's trying to make up for it all,
and it was us that taught her; it was us that took her out of hell and gave her a
glimpse of the other thing!' That's what you'll be able to say, Mr. Teesdale.
And I'll know you're looking at the ranges, and I'll think you're looking at me,
every evening in the summer-time, and every dinner-time all the year round.
They ain't so blue as they look, when you get there—I guess the sky isn't
either when you get there—but they're blue enough for Missy; they're blue
enough for me."
The tears were running down her face. John William had interjected, here
and there, "You're never going back at all." But she had taken no notice of
him; and when he repeated the same speech now, she shook her head and only
sobbed the more.
"What is it that would send you away happy?" asked poor David; for he
knew well what the answer was to be; and by now he was himself intensely
agitated.
"I want someone else to forgive me, too," said Missy, "if it is not too late."
And she looked at the door that led into the passage that led to Mrs. Tees-
dale's room. This door, also, was kept carefully closed.
 "It is too late for you to see her; it would not be safe," said Mr. Teesdale,
sadly shaking his head. "But she lies yonder at peace with all mankind; she has
told me so herself. Rest assured that she forgives you, Missy."
"She would forgive you with all her heart," said Arabella. "She has been so
brave and good—and gentle—ever since she first fell ill. She would forgive
you, Missy, as freely as my father has done."
"She has forgiven you long ago," declared John William. "She spoke to me
about you the morning after she had been to see the doctor without telling us
she was going. She spoke of you then without any bitterness; so she had
forgiven you as long ago as that."
Missy received these optimistic assurances with a look of dissatisfied
doubt, as though she could accept no forgiveness that was not actual and
absolute. Then her eyes found their way back to the passage door; and she
could scarce believe them. She sprang backward with a cry of fear. The other
three started also with one accord—so that the room shook. For the door was
open, and on the threshold, like a spectre, stood none other than the dying
woman herself.
"Forgive you!" she said, in a crazy rattle of a voice. "You!"
She entered without stumbling, shut the door behind her, and took two
steps forward. They appeared the steps of a decrepit, rather than a dying
woman; but they brought her no nearer to Missy, who backed in terror towards
the gun-room. Nor was poor Missy worse than any of the rest, who not one of
them could put out a hand to uphold this tottering, terrible figure, so scared
and shaken were they. And the old woman stood there in her bedclothes, with
a ghastly dew upon her emaciated face, and ordered the young girl out of the
house.
"Forgive you!" she said. "Go; how dare you come back? David—all of you
—how dare you take her in—a common slut—with me on my deathbed? How
long have you had her here, I wonder? Not long, I know, or I should ha' felt it
—I should ha' known! Do you think I could have died in my bed with that—
with that in the house? God forgive you all; and you, out you go. Do you hear?
Go!"
She pointed to the gun-room door with a bony, quivering hand; and
because the girl she abhorred was paralysed with horror, she brought that hand
down passionately upon the table, so that the four sovereigns rang together,
and she saw the gold and notes, and fiercely inquired where they came from.
But now at last David was supporting her in his arms, and he answered
soothingly:
 "They are twenty pounds that Missy borrowed from me when she was with
us—I never told you about it. She has come to-night and paid them back to
me. That's the only reason she is here. She has been all this time earning them,
just to do something to atone."
"Pah!" cried Mrs. Teesdale, stiffening herself in her husband's arms, and
reaching her skinny hands to the notes and gold. "How came you to have
twenty pounds to give her? How comes she to have them to give you back?
How do you think she earned them? Shall I tell you how?" the poor woman
screamed. "They're the wages of sin—the wages of sin—of sin!" She snatched
up gold and notes alike and flung the lot at the fire with all her feeble might.
The gold went ringing round the whitened hearth. The notes fell short.
"Now go," she said to Missy, her scream dropping to a whisper, "and come
back at your peril."
Missy got her hat and jacket from the sofa, brushing the wall all the way,
and never taking her eyes from that awful, menacing, death-smitten face. Then
suddenly she plucked up courage, took one step forward, and stood in
profound humility, mutely asking for that forgiveness which she was never to
get. A strong hand, young Teesdale's, had laid hold of her arm from behind
and given her strength.
David, too, was putting in a quavering word for her.
"She is going," said he. "She was going in any case. You are wrong about
the money. She has earned it honestly, as a farm servant, like our Mary Jane.
Can't you see how brown her face and hands are? We have all forgiven her, as
we hope to be forgiven. Cannot you also forgive her, my dear, and let her go
her ways in peace?"
The sick woman wavered, and for a moment the terrible gaze, transfixing
Missy, turned, by comparison, almost soft. Then it shifted and fell upon the
bearded face of him who was supporting the unhappy girl, and moment, mood
and chance were gone, all three, beyond redemption.
"John William," said his mother, "leave her alone. Do you hear me? Let her
go!"
Nothing happened.
"Let her go!" screamed Mrs. Teesdale. "Choose once and for all between
us—your dying mother and—that—woman!"
At first nothing; then the man's hand dropped clear of the girl.
"Now go," said the woman to the girl.
The girl fled into the gun-room, and so out into the night, only pausing to
shut the doors behind her, one after the other. With the shutting of the outer
door—it was not slammed—they heard the last of Missy.
"Now follow her," said the mother to the man.
But the man remained.

CHAPTER XXI.—"FOR THIS CAUSE."

Now there was nothing but wet grass between the gun-room window and
the river-timber; and that way lay the Dandenong Ranges; therefore it was
clearly Missy's way—until she stopped to think.
This was not until she had very nearly walked into the Yarra itself; it was
only then that she came to know what she was doing, to consider what she
must do next, and to recall coherently the circumstances of her last and final
expulsion from the farmhouse of the Teesdales. Already it seemed to have
happened hours ago, instead of minutes. The hat and jacket she had snatched
up from the sofa were still upon her arm; she put them on now, because
suddenly she had turned cold. Another moment and she could not have said on
which arm she had carried them, she had carried them so short a time. Yet the
deathly face and the deathlier voice of Mrs. Teesdale were as a horror of old
standing; there was something so familiar about them; they seemed to have
dwelt in her memory so long. But, indeed, her mind was in a mist, through
which the remote and the immediate past loomed equally indistinct and far
away.
The mist parted suddenly. One face shone through it with a baleful light. It
was the dreadful face of Mrs. Teesdale.
"Dying!" exclaimed Missy, eyeing the face judicially in her mind. "Dying?
Not she—not now! She may have been dying; but she won't die now. No, I've
saved her by dragging her off her deathbed to curse me and turn me out! I've
heard of folks turning the corner like that. She was right enough, though. You
can't blame her and call her unkind. The others are more to blame for going on
being kind to one of my sort. No, she'd better not die now, she'd much better
leave that to me."
Her mind was in a mist. She tried to see ahead. She must live somewhere,
and she must do something for her living. But what—but where?
There was one matter about which she had not spoken the truth even now;
neither to Arabella, nor to John William, nor to Mr. Teesdale himself. That
was the matter of her new home in the Dandenong Ranges, where she said she
had been so happy, they didn't know! It was no home at all. She was
particularly wretched there. She had stayed on with one object alone; now that
this was accomplished there would be no object at all in going back. She had
not intended ever to return, when leaving; but then her intentions had gone no
further than the paying back to Mr. Teesdale of the twenty pounds obtained
from him once upon a time by fraud. This had been the be-all and end-all of
her existence for many months past. It was strange to be without it now; but to
go back without it, to that farm in the ranges, would be terrible Yet go
somewhere she must; and there was the work which she could do. They would
give her that work again, and readily, as before; they would overwork her,
bully her, speak hardly to her—but clothe her decently, feed her well, and pay
her ten shillings a week, all as before. She must do some work somewhere.
Then what and where else?
Her mind was in a mist.
She saw no future for herself at all, or none that would be tolerable now. If
she had dreamt once of unanimous forgiveness at the farm—of getting work
there in the kitchen, in the cow-shed—that dream had come to such utter
annihilation that even the memory of it entered her head no more. And she
wanted no work elsewhere. So why work at all? She had done enough. Rest
was all she wanted now. It was the newborn desire of her heart; rest, and
nothing more.
And here was the river at her feet; but that thought did not stay or
crystallise just yet.
Before it came the thought of Melbourne and the old life, which parted the
mind's mist with a lurid light. That old life need not necessarily be an
absolutely wicked one. There were points about that old life, wicked or
otherwise. It had warmth, colour, jingle and glare, abundant variety, and
superabundant gaiety. But rest? And rest was all she wanted now—all. And
the mist gathered again in her mind; but the river still ran at her feet.
The river! How little heed she had taken of it until this moment! She had
watched without seeing it, but she noted everything now. That the rain must
have stopped before her banishment from the house, since her dry clothes
were dry still; that overhead there was more clear sky than clouds; that the
clouds were racing past a sickle moon, overwhelming it now and then, like
white waves and a glistening rock; that the wind was shivering and groaning
through the river-timber, and that it had loosened her own hair; that the river
itself was strong, full, noisy and turbulent, and so close, so very close to her
own feet.
She stooped, she knelt, she reached and touched it with her fingers. The
river was certainly very cold and of so full a current that it swept the finger-
tips out of the water as soon as they touched it. But this was only in winter-
time. In summer it was a very different thing.
In summer-time the river was low and still and warm to the hand; the grass
upon the banks was dry and yellow; the bottle-green trees were spotted and
alive with the vivid reds, emeralds, and yellows of parrot, parrakeet, and
cherry-picker; and the blue sky pressed upon the interlacing branches, not only
over one's head but under one's feet, if one stood where Missy was standing
now and looked where she was looking.
She was imagining all these things, as she had heard and seen and felt them
many a time last summer. Last Christmas Day was the one she had especially
in mind. It was so very hard to realise that it was the same place. Yet there was
no getting over that fact. And Missy was closer than she knew to the spot
where she had cast herself upon the ground and shut out sight and hearing
until poor John William arrived upon the spot and brought about a little scene
which she remembered more vividly than many a more startling one of her
own unaided making. Poor Jack, indeed! Since that day he had been daily in
her thoughts, and always as poor Jack. Because he had got it into his head that
he was in love—and with her—that was why he was to be pitied; or rather, it
was why she had pitied him so long, whom she pitied no longer. To-night—
now, at any rate, as she stood by the river—of the two she pitied only herself.
To-night she had seen him again; to-night he had carried her in his arms,
but spoken no word of love to her; to-night he had stood aside and allowed her
to be turned out of the house by his mother who was not dying—not she.
It was as it should be; it was also as she had prayed that it might be. He did
not care. That was all. She only regretted she had so long tormented herself
with the thought that he might, nay, that he did care. She felt the need of that
torment now as keenly as though it had been a comfort. Without it, she was
lonely and alone, and more than ever in need of rest.
Then, suddenly, she remembered how that very day—last Christmas Day
—in the gorgeous summer-time, but in this selfsame spot—the idea had come
to her which was with her now. And her soul rose up in arms against herself
for what she had not done last Christmas Day.
"If only I had," she cried, "the trouble would have been over when it seems
it was only just beginning. I shouldn't have disgusted them as I did on purpose
that very afternoon. A lot of good it did me! And they would all have forgiven
me, when they found out. Even Mrs. Teesdale would have forgiven me then.
And Jack—Jack—I shouldn't have lived to know you never cared."
She clasped her hands in front of her and looked up steadily at the moon. It
was clear of the clouds now—a keen-edged sickle against a slatey sky; and
such light as it shed fell full enough upon the thin brown face and fearless eyes
of the nameless girl whom, as Missy, two or three simple honest folk had
learnt to like so well that they could think of her kindly even when the black
worst was known of her. Her lips moved—perhaps in prayer for those two or
three—perhaps to crave forgiveness for herself; but they never trembled.
Neither did her knees, though suddenly she knelt. And now her eyes were
shut; and it seems, or she must have heard him, her ears also. She opened her
eyes again, however, to look her last at sky and moon. But her eyes were full
of tears. So she shut them tight, and, putting her hands in front of her, swung
slowly forward.
It was then that John William stooped forward and caught her firmly by the
waist; but, after a single shrill scream, the spirit left her as surely as it must
had he never been there.... Only, it came back.
He had taken off his coat. She was lying upon it, while he knelt over her.
The narrow moon was like a glory over his head.
"Why did you do it?" she asked him. "You might have let me get to rest
when—when you didn't care!"
"I do care!" he answered; "and I mean you to rest now all the days of your
life—your new life, Missy. I have cared all the time. But now I care more than
ever."
"Your father and 'Bella——"
"Care as much as I do, pretty nearly, in their own way. Missy, dear, don't
you care, too,—for me?"
She looked at him gratefully through her starting tears. "How can I help it?
You picked me up out of the gutter between you; but it was you alone that kept
me out of it, after I'd gone; because I sort of felt all the time that you cared.
But oh, you must never marry me. I am thinking so of your mother! She will
never, never forgive me; I couldn't expect it; and she is going to get quite
better, you know—I feel sure that she is better already."
He put his hand upon the hair that was only golden in the moonshine: he
peered into the wan face with infinite sadness: for here it was that Missy was
both right and wrong.

THE END.
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