h of his unshaven
lips.

"No! That you were not, or are not, whatever you may say. You--" she
hesitated sweetly--"you had been unsteady when you were here before." He
twitched again, imperceptibly. "I am thankful to see that you are now
more like what you must once have been. I can bear to tell you of my
boy. Oh, sir, can you bear with me?"

Stingaree twitched no more. Rich as the situation was, keenly as he had
savored its unsuspected irony, the humor was all over for him. Here was
a woman, still young, sweet and kind, and gentle as a childish memory,
with her fine eyes full of tears! That was bad enough. To make it worse,
she went on to tell him of her son, him an outlaw, him a bushranger with
a price upon his skin, as she might have outlined the case to a
consulting physician. The boy had been born in the trouble of her early
exile; he could not help his temperament. He had countless virtues; she
extolled him in beaming parentheses. But he had too much imagination and
too little balance. He was morbidly wrapped up in the whole subject of
romantic crime, and no less than possessed with the personality of this
one romantic criminal.

"I should be ashamed to tell you the childish lengths to which he has
gone," she went on, "if he were quite himself on the point. But indeed
he is not. He is Stingaree in his heart, Stingaree in his dreams; it is
as debasing a form as mental and temperamental weakness could well take;
yet I know, who watch over him half of the night. He has an eye-glass;
he keeps revolvers; he has even bought a white mare! He can look
extremely like the portraits one has seen of the wretched man. But come
with me one moment."

She took the lamp and led the way into the little room where Oswald
Melvin slept. He had slept in it from that boyhood in which the brave
woman had opened this sort of shop entirely for his sake. Music was his
only talent; he was obviously not to be a genius in the musical world;
but it was the only one in which she could foresee the selfish,
self-willed child figuring with credit, and her foresight was only
equalled by her resource. The business was ripe and ready for him when
he grew up. And this was what he was making of it.

But Stingaree saw only the little bed that had once been far too large,
the Bible still by its side, read or unread, the parents' portraits
overhead. The mother was looking in an opposite direction; he followed
her eyes, and there at the foot, where the