o thorns wi' a white stone by root o' t'
girt 'un. But they stand a long mile down t' road. Now, if 'ee likes to
go through house an' cross t' paddock, Ah'll put 'ee in sheep path
that'll take thee to Drovers' Track where un runs up 'tween t'
rocks--Bull's Neck, they call it."

When they had finished their tea, and Dick, from the sweetstuff counter,
had crammed into already burdened pockets two half-pound packets of
chocolate, the girl led them to the further gate of her father's
paddock, whence she indicated the highest point of the ridge over which
"T' owd Drovers' Track" threaded its way.

"Howd eyes on t' lofty knob of 'un," she said, "and thou'lt not stray."

For two or three hundred yards the pair walked in silence; and now that
terror had passed with the imminence of danger, and that no strange eyes
surrounded her for which she must play a part not learned nor rehearsed,
the terrible pressure which had brought Amaryllis so close to her
companion was relaxed--not annihilated, but withdrawn to lurk in sky and
air, instead of squeezing the very life and breath out of her physical
body.

Dick, therefore, though not two feet from her side, seemed all at once a
hundred miles away. The man whose arm had held her, and whose coat she
had rubbed her face against, she now found herself too shy to touch or
speak to. Yet she wished to hear his voice, and even more, longed to
feel that he was really there--the same man, no other than she had found
him.

She fixed her eyes upon him, hoping he would feel them and respond--help
her somehow to bridge this silly gulf. But he strode on, at a pace which
made her run lest she should fall behind.

His eyes were set straight forward, his head a little bent. No smoke
came from the pipe in his mouth, and the whole expression of face and
figure was of dogged endurance. A little trickle of blood had started
afresh from the wound on his cheek. She wondered what had set it flowing
again. Could it have been some clumsiness of her own in her convulsive
clinging to him?

A woman's compassion, more easily aroused by a cut finger than by a
suffering mind, narrowed the chasm between them, until a small, soft
voice bridged it.

"Dick!" she cried. "Oh, Dick."

But the stiff face remained rigid, so the frightened girl quickened her
pace until she was well in front; then, turning, she saw that their lids
covered two-thirds of the eye-balls, and that the mechanism of the man
was driven by an