"Jack" Harrington, the overlander, became "Mr." John
Harrington, the pastoralist and owner of Tinandra Downs, and then the
vision of Myra Lyndon's face came to him very often--now that he was so
prosperous.

One day he told his overseer that he was going to Sydney for a trip, and
being a man of action, packed his valise, mounted his horse, and rode
off on his journey of five hundred miles to the nearest seaport where he
could take passage for Sydney.

For the first week or so after his arrival in the city, he "mooned"
about doing nothing, and trying to pluck up courage enough to go to Myra
Lyndon to ask her to be his wife. He had called several times upon her
father and discussed business matters with him; but beyond inquiring
after "Mrs. Lyndon and the Misses Lyndon," had said nothing further,
and in a nervous, shamefaced manner had each time accepted Mr. Lyndon's
invitation to "come and see the girls before he went back to the North,"
but had not had the courage to go. Next week, or the week after
that, would do, he thought. If she said "No," he wouldn't feel it so
much--once he was on his way North again in the old _Florence Irving_;
he would put it off till just as he was ready to start. Then if she said
"Yes," he would stay in Sydney as long as his love wished--a month--aye,
six months, so long as she came back with him to Tinandra Downs. And
Myra Lyndon, who knew from her father that her "bullock-driver admirer,"
as she had mockingly called him to her friends, was in Sydney, waited
for him impatiently. A systematic course of jilting and being jilted had
made her feel anxious as to her future, and gall and wormwood had come
to her now that her two younger sisters had married before her, and left
her, as her somewhat acidulous-tongued mother said, "the Lyndon family
wallflower." She meant to marry him, spend a year or so among the
"beastly bellowing cattle," and then return to Sydney, where as Mrs.
Harrington, the wealthy squatter's wife, she could enjoy herself
thoroughly, snub some of the women she hated, and flirt with some of the
men she liked.

Late one night, Harrington, sauntering from the theatre to his hotel,
met, to his intense astonishment, a man he knew--had known years before
when he (Harrington) was a drover and the other man--Walters--was a
mounted trooper in the Queensland police.

They shook hands warmly, and then Walters said, "Come along with me,
Jack, to the Water Police Station; we can have