any of you
hear any more talk about Lester and Nina Charlton and repeats it in my
hearing I'll do my best to make him sorry."

*****

Lester was the manager of a mine and quartz-crushing battery near
Charlton's plantation on the Lower Burdekin River when he "took it out"
of its owner. He was a quiet, self-possessed man of about thirty,
and occasionally visited Charlton and his wife and played a game of
billiards--if Charlton was sober enough to stand. Sometimes in his rides
along the lonely bush tracks he would meet Mrs. Charlton and go as
far as the plantation gates with her. She was a small, slenderly built
woman, or rather girl, with dark, passionate eyes, in whose liquid
depths Lester could read the sorrows of her life with such a man as
Henry Charlton. Once as he rode beside her through the grey monotone of
the lofty, smooth-barked gum-trees she told him that her father was an
Englishman and her mother a Portuguese.

"I married Captain Charlton in Macao. He was in the navy, you know; and
although it is only four years since I left my father's house I feel
so old; and sometimes when I awake in the night I think I can hear the
sound of the beating surf and the rustle of the nipa-palms in the trade
wind. And, oh! I so long to see----" Her eyes filled with tears, and she
turned her face away.

Perhaps Lester's unconsciously pitying manner to her whenever they met,
and the utter loneliness of her existence on the Belle Grace Plantation
made Nina Charlton think too much of the young mine manager, and,
without knowing it, to eagerly look forward to their chance meetings.

One day as Lester was walking through Charlton's estate, gun in
hand, looking for wild turkeys, he met her. She was seated under the
widespreading branches of a Leichhardt-tree, and was watching some of
her husband's labourers felling a giant gum.

"I came out to see it fall," she said. "It is the largest tree on
Belle Grace. And it is so dull in the house." She turned her face away
quickly.

Lester muttered a curse under his breath. He knew what she meant.
Charlton had returned from Townsville the day before in a state of
frenzy, and after threatening to murder his servants had flung himself
upon a couch to sleep the sleep of drunkenness.

As the men hewed at the bole of the mighty tree Lester and Nina Charlton
talked. She had spent the first year of her married life in Sydney,
which was Lester's native town, and in a few minutes she had quite