hers.... It's my fault;
it's a judgment.... I wanted to make my children better than others....
I was so proud, Mary."

Mary had a sweetheart, a drover, who was supposed to be in Queensland.
He had promised to marry her, and take her and her mother away when he
returned; at least, she had promised to marry him on that condition. He
had now been absent on his latest trip for nearly six months, and there
was no news from him. She got a copy of a country paper to look for the
"stock passings"; but a startling headline caught her eye:

IMPUDENT ATTEMPT AT ROBBERY UNDER ARMS.
----
"A drover known to the police as Frederick Dunn, alias Drew,
was arrested last week at----"

She read to the bitter end, and burned the paper. And the shadow of
another trouble, darker and drearier than all the rest, was upon her.

So the little outcast family in Long Gully existed for several months,
seeing no one save a sympathetic old splitter who would come and smoke
his pipe by the fire of nights, and try to convince the old woman that
matters might have been worse, and that she wouldn't worry so much if
she knew the troubles of some of our biggest families, and that things
would come out all right and the lesson would do Wylie good. Also, that
Tom was a different boy altogether, and had more sense than to go
wrong again. "It was nothing," he said, "nothing; they didn't know what
trouble was."

But one day, when Mary and her mother were alone, the troopers came
again.

"Mrs. Wylie, where's your son Tom?" they asked.

She sat still. She didn't even cry, "Oh, my God!"

"Don't be frightened, Mrs. Wylie," said one of the troopers, gently. "It
ain't for much anyway, and maybe Tom'll be able to clear himself."

Mary sank on her knees by her mother's side, crying "Speak to me,
mother. Oh, my God, she's dying! Speak for my sake, mother. Don't die,
mother; it's all a mistake. Don't die and leave me here alone."

But the poor old woman was dead.

. . . . .

Wylie came out towards the end of the year, and a few weeks later he
brought home a--another woman.

IV.

Bob Bentley, general hawker, was camping under some rocks by the main
road, near the foot of Long Gully. His mate was fast asleep under the
tilted trap. Bob stood with his back to the fire, his pipe in his mouth,
and his hands clasped behind him. The fire lit up the undersides of the