f such a type as the one who had outwitted
him. It was a new experience for him to be beaten at his own game, still
a newer experience to find himself remembering the one by whom he was
beaten as he was remembering the woman whose voice, despite his surly
antagonism, rang in his ears with a melody which was as the song of a
syren. Each time he had measured swords with her she had triumphed--just
as, in the far-off days, Kitty Lambton had triumphed.

Kitty Lambton!

He pulled himself up short as the name passed through his mind. Why
should he recall her now as Kitty Lambton when she had ceased to be
that the day she left Waroona Downs with O'Guire? Why should this
resolute woman recall her as Kitty Lambton and not as Kitty O'Guire?

As he drove along the lonely bush track which led to Taloona, his mind
drifted across the years to the time when first he had come to the
district, to the time when Kitty Lambton stood for him for all that was
noble and generous and pure in life; when he was content to work the
livelong day with a light heart and happy mind, satisfied with the
reward of her presence when his day's work was done. For a mile or so of
the journey he strove to nurse his resentment against this clear-eyed
woman whose raven black hair was in such absolute contrast to the flaxen
locks of the vanished Kitty, but whose voice had caused the intrusion of
these bygone memories into his waking thoughts. But gradually,
unconsciously, the long-suppressed recollections of the girl who had
charmed his youthful fancies took possession of him.

Hitherto, whenever he had remembered her, it was with bitterness and
anger; but now his mind was as free from anger as though the cause for
it had never existed. It was the time when Kitty was the charmer which
had come to him, the time when the gnawing anguish of betrayal was
unknown, and slowly there obtruded itself upon him a dim, shadowy,
speculating wonder as to all which might have been had she never changed
for him from the charmer to the betrayer.

But he was not used to introspective analysis, and the efforts to
grapple with the subtleties of his own subconscious memories brought a
tendency to his mind to lose the clear-cut edge of a fact in a blur of
misty vision. No longer did the memory of Nora Burke irritate him. Had
he associated her with Kitty the betrayer, the irritation would never
have passed; but as it was Kitty the charmer her voice brought to him,
he drifted, in