but for Captain Frere's
exertions."

"Dear, dear! a strange story, indeed," said Mr. Meekin. "And so the
young lady doesn't know anything about it?" "Only what she has been
told, of course, poor dear. She's engaged to Captain Frere."

"Really! To the man who saved her. How charming--quite a romance!"

"Isn't it? Everybody says so. And Captain Frere's so much older than she
is."

"But her girlish love clings to her heroic protector," said Meekin,
mildly poetical. "Remarkable and beautiful. Quite the--hem!--the ivy
and the oak, dear leddies. Ah, in our fallen nature, what sweet spots--I
think this is the gate."

A smart convict servant--he had been a pickpocket of note in days gone
by--left the clergyman to repose in a handsomely furnished drawing-room,
whose sun blinds revealed a wealth of bright garden flecked with
shadows, while he went in search of Miss Vickers. The Major was out, it
seemed, his duties as Superintendent of Convicts rendering such absences
necessary; but Miss Vickers was in the garden, and could be called in at
once. The Reverend Meekin, wiping his heated brow, and pulling down his
spotless wristbands, laid himself back on the soft sofa, soothed by the
elegant surroundings no less than by the coolness of the atmosphere.
Having no better comparison at hand, he compared this luxurious room,
with its soft couches, brilliant flowers, and opened piano, to the
chamber in the house of a West India planter, where all was glare and
heat and barbarism without, and all soft and cool and luxurious within.
He was so charmed with this comparison--he had a knack of being easily
pleased with his own thoughts--that he commenced to turn a fresh
sentence for the Bishop, and to sketch out an elegant description of
the oasis in his desert of a vineyard. While at this occupation, he was
disturbed by the sound of voices in the garden, and it appeared to him
that someone near at hand was sobbing and crying. Softly stepping on the
broad verandah, he saw, on the grass-plot, two persons, an old man and a
young girl. The sobbing proceeded from the old man.

"'Deed, miss, it's the truth, on my soul. I've but jest come back to yez
this morning. O my! but it's a cruel trick to play an ould man."

He was a white-haired old fellow, in a grey suit of convict frieze, and
stood leaning with one veiny hand upon the pedestal of a vase of roses.

"But it is your own fault, Danny; we all warned you against her," said
the young