"Is it? Ah! so it is. But we must expect cold weather in May. I suppose it is rather strange to you to be finding winter coming on at this season?" "No. Why should it be strange to me?" "I thought--I am sure somebody told me--that you were recently out from England." "Oh, dear, no," she replied, frankly. "I was born in this colony, and have lived in it all my life." "In the name of fortune, where?" "In different places; at Sandhurst, at Ballarat, and on the Upper Murray, and in little townships here and there in the bush; and sometimes in Melbourne." "I am sure I never saw you in Melbourne until I met you at that dance the other night," he protested earnestly. "I never should have forgotten your face if I had once seen it." "I daresay not," she said, and she was angry to find herself blushing again. "I was but a child when I lived in Melbourne before, and--and my home was not in Toorak then." Mr. Kingston understood. She had been a poor relation in those days, and the Misses Hardy were unmarried. He had a constitutional antipathy to poor relations, and he was a little disappointed. For a few seconds he kept silence, while he wondered what her antecedents could have been. Then he looked at her again, and she was regarding him with a curious gravity of demeanour, almost as if she had divined his thoughts. There was a meek majesty about her that commanded his respect, and that he considered was excessively becoming. After all, what did it matter about her antecedents? Did she not look a thoroughly well-bred little woman, sitting there in her furs and soft cushions, with her head held so straight? Did he not hear other men--better men than he from a genealogical point of view--singing her praises wherever he went? Whatever she had been, she was a distinguished personage now, whose acquaintance it behoved a veteran lady-killer to cultivate, and that without delay. "I am very glad your home is in Toorak now," he said gallantly. "I have some land there myself, quite close to your uncle's place." "Indeed," murmured Rachel. "Yes, and I am going to build on it soon. I have just got the plans out from home--capital plans. I shall bring them in for Mrs. Hardy's opinion. When my house is built we shall be neighbours. You will have to help me, you and your aunt, with the furnishing and all that sort of thing that ladies understand." "I don't think I understand much about it," she said; "but I shall like to see it done. I am very fond of pretty furniture. Will your house be very big?" "Oh, nothing out of the way. I'm not going to spend _more_ than twenty thousand pounds on it. My friends tell me I ought to do the thing properly when I am about it; but I don't see the fun of locking up a lot of money in bricks and mortar. I might want to change my residence any day, you see." Rachel looked at him with awe. There was a flippancy in the way he spoke of that twenty thousand pounds which almost shocked her.