-for provisions had run out,
and on that account, and because the horses had strayed in the night,
they had to go again to the house. The old man, sober and ashamed,
captivated likewise by Lady Bridget's beauty and charm, apologised
almost on his knees--he made Biddy think of Thackeray's picture of Sir
Pitt Crawley proposing to Becky Sharp. Old Mr Duppo, it was--the father
of Zack Duppo, the horse-breaker, who had recently been breaking in
colts at Moongarr.

They stayed till the horses were found. Mr Duppo had a housekeeper--now
if Mrs Hensor had been like that housekeeper there could have been no
cause for jealous scandal. An aged dame, long, bony--dressed in a short
green petticoat and tartan jacket, with a little checked shawl over her
head and pinned under a bearded chin. She poured tea out of a tin
teapot and leaned over her master's chair at meal times to carve the
salt beef.

Lady Bridget sketched the pair. The old man roared over the sketch, but
the housekeeper bore her a grudge for it, and afterwards had not a good
word for the 'Ladyship' who had slipped out of her proper sphere into
the Never-Never country.

There were plenty of other small adventures which would have made the
hair of Lady Gaverick and her friends stand on end. A dream-drive
indeed, full of sort of 'Alice in Wonderland' episodes. Bush life Out
Back--a jumble of odd characters and situations. Fencers' camps,
cattle-drivers' camps, bullock-dray camps. There had been a baby born
unexpectedly under the tilt of a bullock-dray, on one occasion, the
night before McKeith's party appeared on the scene, and Lady Bridget
had a trunk down from the buggy, and there in the road tore up some of
her fine-laced smocks and petticoats to provide swaddling clothes for
the poor little scrap of mortality. And there were tramps 'humping
bluey' on the track likewise, and diggers carrying their picks. Bridget
liked seeing Colin hail-fellow-well-met with them all--sharing tucker
and quart-pot tea. She wished that her socialistic friends of the old
played-out civilisation could see this shrewd, practical humanitarian
of the Bush.

They came very close to each other in those long days of the
dream-drive. He talked to her as he had never talked before, and as he
talked rarely afterwards. He drew aside curtains from recesses of his
real nature, the existence of which she had not suspected, and, in
truth, at a later time, doubted. Then, if in broad sunlight the shy,