ee some chance of rejoining her, you will die. How you are to
do it I don't know.'

'I am bound to make a try next month,' says Jim. 'If I don't do
something towards it I shall go mad.'

'You could not do a wiser thing,' says Starlight, 'in one way, or more
foolish thing in another. Meantime, why should we not make the best
of the pleasant surroundings with which Nature provides us here--green
turf, sparkling water, good sport, and how bright a day! Could we be
more favoured by Fortune, slippery dame that she is? It is an Australian
Decameron without the naughty stories.'

'Do you know, sometimes I really think I am enjoying myself,' said
Aileen, half to herself, 'and then I feel that it must be a dream. Such
dreadful things are waiting for me--for us all.' Then she shuddered and
trembled.

She did not know the most dreadful thing of all yet. We had carefully
kept it from her. We chanced its not reaching her ears until after she
had got home safe and had time to grieve over it all by herself.

We had a kind of feeling somehow that us four might never meet again
in the same way, or be able to enjoy one another's company for a month,
without fear of interruption, again, as long as we lived.

So we all made up our minds, in spite of the shadow of evil that would
crawl up now and then, to enjoy each other's company while it lasted,
and make the best of it.

Starlight for all that seemed altered like, and every now and then he'd
go off with Warrigal and stay away from daylight to dark. When he did
come he'd sit for hours with his hands before him and never say a word
to any one. I saw Aileen watch him when he looked like that, not that
she ever said anything, but pretended to take it as a matter of course.

Other times he'd be just as much the other way. He'd read to her, and
he had a good many books, poetry, and all kinds of things stowed away
in the part of the cave he called his own. And he'd talk about other
countries that he'd been in, and the strange people he'd seen, by the
hour together, while she would sit listening and looking at him, hardly
saying a thing, and regular bound up in his words. And he could talk
once he was set agoing. I never saw a man that could come up to him.

Aileen wasn't one of those sort of girls that took a fancy to any
good-looking sort of fellow that came across her. Quite the other way.
She seemed to think so little about it that Jim and I always used to say
she'd be an old maid,