‘And now I must order you, Mr. Neuchamp, to betake yourself to your room. Look in the glass and see if your complexion hasn’t suffered. Was it the Count’s blood which flowed, or did you scratch your face with the prickly pear hedge? Let me look! Merciful heaven!’ exclaimed the girl, with a half scream, as she narrowly scanned her deliverer’s face; ‘why, there is the deep trace of a bullet on your temple. How providential that it was the least bit wide—a slight turn of your head—a shade nearer the temple, and you would have been lying there dead—dead! How awful to think of!’ Here she covered her face with her hands. Tears trickled through the slender palms as her overwrought feelings found relief in a sudden burst of weeping. Mr. Neuchamp’s attempts at consolation would appear not to have been wholly ineffectual, if one may judge from the concluding sentences of rather a long-whispered conversation, all carried on prior to the lavation of his gory countenance. ‘I always thought,’ said Antonia, smiling through her tears, with as much satirical emphasis as could coexist with so sudden an access of happiness, ‘that you wanted some one to take care of you in Australia. I fear I have been led into undertaking a very serious responsibility.’ ‘May it not be the other way?’ very naturally inquired Ernest. ‘If I had not been, as Jack would say, “there or thereabouts” to-day, some one might have been a pirate’s bride, after all. Miss Folleton, of course, had prior claims, but——‘ ‘But—please to go and render yourself presentable, this instant. We shall have such an amount of talking to do before we can put poor dear old pappy in possession of all the news. Good gracious, how can we ever tell him? How furious he will be!’ ‘Will he?’ inquired Ernest, with affected apprehension; ‘perhaps we had better defer our——’ ‘I don’t mean _that_—and you know it, sir; but, unless you wish to be taken for a pirate yourself, or an escaped I-don’t-know-what, you will do as I tell you.’ So Ernest was fain to do as he was bid, commencing, unconsciously indeed, that period of servitude to which every son of Adam, all unheeding, is pledged who rivets on himself the flower-wreathed adamantine fetters of matrimony. He sought Mr. Frankston’s extremely comfortable dressing-room, at the behest of his beloved _châtelaine_; and very glad he was to find himself there. His sense of relief and general congratulation was, however, slightly alloyed by the thought of the stupendous amount of explanation and narrative due to Paul Frankston, when this now fast-approaching hour of dinner should arrive. ‘I would it were bedtime, and all well,’ groaned he, in old Falstaff’s words, as he addressed himself to the rather serious duties of the toilette. Mr. Frankston arrived from town but a few minutes before the dinner-hour, and, like a wise man, made at once for his room.