s he went on kept
wondering whether she was thinking of him at all, and hoping that she
might be sorry that he was gone. "Probably, however," he thought, "she
is only sorry for her brother."

They three stayed at Baroona a week or more, one of them riding up
every day to ask after Mary Hawker. Otherwise they spent their time
shooting and fishing, and speculating how soon the rains would come,
for it was now March, and autumn was fairly due.

But at the end of this week, as the three were sitting together, one of
those long-legged, slab-sided, lean, sunburnt, cabbage-tree-hatted
lads, of whom Captain Brentwood kept always, say half-a-dozen, and the
Major four or five (I should fancy, no relation to one another, and yet
so exactly alike, that Captain Brentwood never called them by their
right names by any chance); lads who were employed about the stable and
the paddock, always in some way with the horses; one of those
representatives of the rising Australian generation, I say, looked in,
and without announcing himself, or touching his hat (an Australian
never touches his hat if he is a free man, because the prisoners are
forced to), came up to Jim across the drawingroom, as quiet and as
self-possessed as if he was quite used to good society, and, putting a
letter into his hand, said merely, "Miss Alice," and relapsed into
silence, amusing himself by looking round Mrs. Buckley's drawing-room,
the like of which he had never seen before.

Sam envied Jim the receipt of that little threecornered note. He
wondered whether there was anything about him in it. Jim read it, and
then folded it up again, and said "Hallo!"

The lad,--I always call that sort of individual a lad; there is no
other word for them, though they are of all ages, from sixteen to
twenty,--the lad, I say, was so taken up with the contemplation of a
blown-glass pressepapier on the table, that Jim had to say, "Hallo
there John!"

The lad turned round, and asked in a perfectly easy manner, "What the
deuce is this thing for, now?"

"That," said Jim, "is the button of a Chinese mandarin's hat, who was
killed at the battle of Waterloo in the United States by Major Buckley."

"Is it now?" said the lad, quite contented. "It's very pretty; may I
take it up?"

"Of course you may," said Jim. "Now, what's the foal like?"

"Rather leggy, I should say," he returned. "Is there any answer?"

Jim wrote a few lines with a pencil on half his sister's note, and gave
i