there, ain't you? I was by there a
fortnight ago.' He saw he'd made a wrong move, and made it worse. 'I
mean,' says he, 'Maraganoa on the Clarence side.' 'Ah!' says I, 'in the
Cedar country?' 'Precisely,' says he. And there we sat drinking
together, and I had no more notion of its being him than you would have
had."

She sat still listening to him, eating nothing. Lee's words outside
had, she knew not why, struck a chill into her heart, and as she
listened to Tom's story, although she could make nothing of it, she
felt as though getting colder and colder. She shivered, although the
night was hot. Through the open window she could hear all those
thousand commingled indistinguishable sounds that make the night-life
of the bush, with painful distinctness. She arose and went to the
window.

The night was dark and profoundly still. The stars were overhead,
though faintly seen through a haze; and beyond the narrow enclosures in
front of the house, the great forest arose like a black wall. Tom and
Charles went on talking inside, and yet, though their voices were loud,
she was hardly conscious of hearing them, but found herself watching
the high dark wood and listening to the sound of the frogs in the
creek, and the rustle of a million crawling things, heard only in the
deep stillness of night.

Deep in the forest somewhere, a bough cracked, and fell crashing, then
all was silent again. Soon arose a wind, a partial wandering wind,
which came slowly up, and, rousing the quivering leaves to life for a
moment, passed away; then again a silence, deeper than ever, so that
she could hear the cattle and horses feeding in the lower paddock, a
quarter of a mile off; then a low wail in the wood, then two or three
wild weird yells, as of a devil in torment, and a pretty white curlew
skirled over the housetop to settle on the sheepwash dam.

The stillness was awful; it boded a storm, for behind the forest blazed
up a sheet of lightning, showing the shape of each fantastic elevated
bough. Then she turned round to the light, and said,--

"My dear partner, I had a headache, and went to the window. What was
the story you were telling Charles, just now? Who was the man you met
in the publichouse, who seems to have frightened you so?"

"No less a man than Captain Touan, my dear cousin!" said Tom, leaning
back with the air of a man who has made a point, and would be glad to
hear "what you have to say to that, sir."

"Touan?" repeated Mar