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him too. He knew what was waiting in England, he could afford to let it wait a little longer.

Cloncurry seemed a good place to start from, and it was quicker to go that way than by sea. He must walk, of course—strange for Lord Trent, they would say! but naturally he would not have any money to speak of—yet.

“It will be easy enough,” he thought; “as long as I act as if it’s a matter of course, they’ll think that it is.”

It was mad! He thought of Alison, and smiled quickly. She had sent him such a dear letter in answer to the long one (mainly an apology) which he wrote at Honolulu. He had said, in extenuation of his bad manners, that when she scolded him she lost her peculiar Alison-ness, and nothing seemed to matter much. For she was really the only person who had ever praised him. . . . And she said—she said———

He loved remembering those warm, generous words of praise, they made him feel humbler than anything he had met hitherto in all his hard young life. He got the letter just before leaving Sydney, and he was carrying it with him then—but he must leave it behind on the plain where he was to die, because it was a proof of identity. . . . Odd! He hated the idea of that. He would destroy that letter—but the loss of it loomed larger in his mind than the loss of his name and his past. He remembered how he had written the lines that had called it forth, on the Glaucus when the throb of the engines had ceased and he could go on deck to get a little air; he had been uncertain then as to how Alison would receive them. After all, he had no claim, he was not rooted—perhaps everything had been spoilt by that last day in Philadelphia.

He might have known that Alison didn’t go by claims! He laughed at his own blindness and woke up to the rocking landscape again. He had not been seeing it while he thought of Alison. A mob of kangaroos stood erect at gaze for a moment, and then bounded away in frantic haste. Tony