hing to do for a bit but to take it easy and enjoy yourself. No
matter how light your work may be, if it's regular and has to be done
every day, the harness 'll gall somewhere; you get tired in time and
sick of the whole thing.

Jim and I knew well that, bar accidents, we were as safe in the Hollow
as we used to be in our beds when we were boys. We'd searched it through
and through last time, till we'd come to believe that only three or
four people, and those sometimes not for years at a time, had ever been
inside of it. There were no tracks of more.

We could see how the first gang levied; they were different. Every now
and then they had a big drink--'a mad carouse', as the books say--when
they must have done wild, strange things, something like the Spanish
Main buccaneers we'd read about. They'd brought captives with them, too.
We saw graves, half-a-dozen together, in one place. THEY didn't belong
to the band.

We had a quiet, comfortable meal, and a smoke afterwards. Then Jim and I
took a long walk through the Hollow, so as to tell one another what was
in our minds, which we hadn't a chance to do before. Before we'd gone
far Jim pulls a letter out of his pocket and gives it to me.

'It was no use sending it to you, old man, while you was in the jug,'
he says; 'it was quite bad enough without this, so I thought I'd keep it
till we were settled a bit like. Now we're going to set up in business
on our own account you'd best look over your mail.'

I knew the writing well, though I hadn't seen it lately. It was from
her--from Kate Morrison that was. It began--not the way most women
write, like HER, though--

So this is the end of your high and mighty doings, Richard Marston,
passing yourself and Jim off as squatters. I don't blame him--[no, of
course not, nobody ever blamed Jim, or would, I suppose, if he'd burned
down Government House and stuck up his Excellency as he was coming out
of church]--but when I saw in the papers that you had been arrested for
cattle-stealing I knew for the first time how completely Jeanie and I
had been duped.

I won't pretend that I didn't think of the money you were said to have,
and how pleasant it would be to spend some of it after the miserable,
scrambling, skimping life we had lately been used to. But I loved you,
Dick Marston, for YOURSELF, with a deep and passionate love which you
will never know now, which you would scorn and treat lightly, perhaps,
if you did know. You may