l looks all so gay, don't you? I bet grandma
will rouse, but I'll have a little peace with him now an' chance the
ducks," said the resourceful warder, whose charge really looked so
absurd that I was provoked to laughter.

"How did you manage him? Was he tractable?"

"He soon dropped that there was no good in bein' nothing else. He
spluttered something about me disgracin' him, because something on his
crest said he was brave or something; but I told him I didn't care a
hang if he had a crest the size of a cockatoo or was as bald as Uncle
Jake, that I was full of him actin' the goat, an' that finished him."

"Enough too," I laughed, as I bade the Australian lad, with the very
Australian estimate of the unimportance of some things sacred to
English minds, the Australian parting salute--

"So long!"

TWENTY.

"ALAS! HOW EASILY THINGS GO WRONG!"

On ascending to my room I did not, as expected, find Dawn sobbing, but
she had her face so determinedly turned away that I refrained from
remark. I was none the worse for the diverting incidents of the
evening, because the excitement of them had come from without instead
of within. The rush of the trains soon became a far-away sound, and
the light that flashed from their engine-doors as they climbed the
first zig of the mountain, and which could be seen from my bed, had
been shut from my sight by the fogs of approaching sleep, when I was
aroused by heart-broken sobbing from the bed by the opposite wall.

After a while I got out of bed, bent on an attempt to comfort.

"Dawn, what is it?"

"I'm sorry I waked you, I thought you were sound asleep," she said,
pulling in with a violent effort but speedily breaking into renewed
sobs.

"I was thinking of poor little Mrs Rooney-Molyneux, and how my mother
died," said the girl, rolling over and burying her lovely head in her
tear-drenched pillow. "I can't help thinking about the sadness and
cruelty of life to women."

I felt certain that a matter less deep and lying farther from the core
of being was perturbing her more, but as she chose to ignore it, I did
likewise.

"Well, we must not dwell too sadly on that for which we are not
responsible, and women are privileged in being able to repay the cost
of their being."

"Yes, I always remember that, and often shudder to think I might have
been a man, with their greater possibilities of cowardliness and
selfish cruelty, as illustrated by old Rooney and Miss Flipp's
des