heard it, and
wants----now then, here, hold up!" he broke off, as Mrs. Taylor, taken
terribly aback, looked from one to the other with startled eyes.

"What right has he to talk--now?" she asked, with a return of the
savage jealousy she had shown when, twenty years before, she thought the
baby was to have been taken from her--the baby which was now the
stalwart, handsome young bushman who was watching her with such winsome
eyes. "Is that what's made her change, Tony?" she went on, resentment
against the girl, whom she held to be responsible for Tony leaving the
Flat, still uppermost in her mind.

"I don't know," he answered. "Last night Marmot's store was burned,
after we had left our gold there, and the gold was stolen. We rode the
thieves down. One of them was badly thrown and died. I stayed with him
while the others went on, and he told me he knew me because I was like
my--my father; and then he said he stole me as a baby and left me here.
I wouldn't have believed it only Nuggan said there was something wrong,
and then I made up my mind to come out and ask. What is the truth?"

"That's it," Taylor said. "A chap came here one night and said--said he
was left with you, and we took you and kept you and brought you up like
our own."

Mrs. Taylor, touching Tony on the arm, pointed to the vine-covered rail
in the corner of the paddock.

"He'd just gone," she said sadly.

"And the chap never came back and never sent a word, and it was nobody's
business--so we kept you as our own," Taylor added.

"And if _that's_ why the girl----"

"There's more than that," Tony said. "If one part of the man's yarn is
true, all of it may be. He said he'd killed my father, and then stole me
in revenge on my mother; and he jeered me, dying as he was, and swore
I'd never find her, though she was seeking for me now. I only thought he
was raving then; I don't know now."

For a few moments there was silence between them.

"If he did that----" Mrs. Taylor began, and stopped.

Her memory turned back to the sorrow she had known when her firstborn
went from her, when the aching void came into her life and robbed it of
every joy and every zest, till the waif was brought to her, the care of
whom filled her life with happiness and content. Her big motherly heart
was trying to understand something of the anguish she would have known
had that waif not come to her then; and she thought of the anguish that
other mother must have known if the st