o' some continents," he remarked, "but it
wasn't so where Joey Clynes and me was nourished, so to speak. I
tripped up on a good many mean things from Bendigo to Thargomindah and
back around. The back-blocks has its tricks as well as the towns, as
you would see if you come across a stock-rider with a cheque to be
broke in his hand. I've seen six months' wages go bung in a day with a
stock-rider on the gentle jupe. But again, peradventure, I've seen a
man that had lost ten thousand sheep tramp fifty miles in a blazing sun
with a basket of lambs on his back, savin' them two switherin' little
papillions worth nothin' at all, at the risk of his own life--just as
mates have done here on this salamanderin' veld; same as Colonel Byng
did to-day along o' Wortmann's Drift."

Jasmine had been trying to ask a question concerning her husband ever
since the man had mentioned his name, and had not been able to do so.
She had never spoken of him directly to any one since she had left
England; had never heard from him; had written him no word; was, so far
as the outer acts of life were concerned, as distant from him as
Corporal Shorter was from his native Bendigo. She had been busy as she
had never before been in her life, in a big, comprehensive, useful way.
It had seemed to her in England, as she carried through the
negotiations for the Valoria, fitted it out for the service it was to
render, directed its administration over the heads of the committee
appointed, for form's sake, to assist Lady Tynemouth and herself, that
the spirit of her grandfather was over her, watching her, inspiring
her. This had become almost an obsession with her. Her grandfather had
had belief in her, delight in her; and now the innumerable talks she
had had with him, as to the way he had done things, gave her confidence
and a key to what she had to do. It was the first real work; for what
she did for Ian Stafford in diplomacy was only playing upon the
weakness of human nature with a skilled intelligence, with an
instinctive knowledge of men and a capacity for managing them. The
first real pride she had ever felt soothed her angry soul.

Her grandfather had been more in her mind than any one else--than
either Rudyard or Ian Stafford. Towards both of these her mind had
slowly and almost unconsciously changed, and she wished to think about
neither. There had been a revolution in her nature, and all her tragic
experience, her emotions, and her faculties, had be