e stack, the bushranger remained for months. Then there
was an encounter, not the first of this period, but the first in which
shots were exchanged. One of these pierced the lungs of his melodeon--an
instrument more notorious by this time than the musical-box before it--a
still greater treasure to Stingaree. That was near the full of a certain
summer moon; it was barely waning to the eye when the battered buyer of
melodeons came for a new one to the shop in the pretty bush town.

The shop was closed for the night, but Stingaree knocked at a lighted
window under the veranda, which Mrs. Melvin presently threw up. Her eyes
flashed when she recognized one against whom she now harbored a
bitterness on quite a different plane of feeling from her former
repulsion. Even to his first glance she looked an older and a harder
woman.

"I am sorry to see you," she said, with a soft vehemence plainly foreign
to herself. "I almost hate the sight of you! You have been the ruin of
my son!"

"His ruin?"

Stingaree forgot the speech of the unlettered stockman; but his cry was
too short to do worse than warn him.

"Come round," continued Mrs. Melvin, austerely. "I will see you. You
shall hear what you have done."

In another minute he was in the parlor where he had sat aforetime. He
never dreamt of sitting now. But the lady took her accustomed chair as a
queen her throne.

"_Is_ he ruined?" asked Stingaree.

"Not irrevocably--not yet; but he may be any moment. He must be before
long."

"But--but what ails him, madame?"

"Villain-worship!" cried the lady, with a tragic face stripped of all
its humor, and bare without it as a winter's tree.

"I remember! Yes--I understand. He was mad about--Stingaree."

"It is madness now," said the bitter mother. "It was only a stupid,
hare-brained fancy then, but now it is something worse. You're the first
to whom I have admitted it," she continued, with illogical indignation,
"because it's all through you!"

"All through me?"

"You told him a tale. You made that villain a greater hero in his eyes
than ever. You made him real."

"He is real enough, God knows!"

"But you made him so to my son." The keen eyes softened for one divine
instant before they filled. "And I--I am talking my own boy over
with--with----"

Stingaree stood in twofold embarrassment. Did she know after all who he
was? And what had he said he was, the time before?

"The lowest of the low," he answered, with a twitc