She stood for some time gazing at the view before her. She could see her father’s house, like a white dot upon the hill-side, though strangely enough it was a blue reek of smoke upon the opposite slope which seemed to attract the greater part of her attention. She lingered there, watching it with a wistful look in her hazel eyes. Then the loneliness of her situation seemed to strike her, and she felt one of those spasmodic fits of unreasoning terror to which the bravest women are subject. Tales of natives and of bushrangers, their daring and their cruelty, flashed across her. She glanced at the great mysterious stretch of silent bushland beside her, and stooped to pick up her basket with the intention of hurrying along the road in the direction of the gulches. She started round, and hardly suppressed a scream as a long, red-flannelled arm shot out from behind her and withdrew the basket from her very grasp. The figure which met her eye would to some have seemed little calculated to allay her fears. The high boots, the rough shirt, and the broad girdle with its weapons of death were, however, too familiar to Miss Carrie to be objects of terror; and when above them all she saw a pair of tender blue eyes looking down upon her, and a half-abashed smile lurking under a thick yellow mustache, she knew that for the remainder of that walk ranger and black would be equally powerless to harm her. “Oh, Mr. Durton,” she said, “how you did startle me!” “I’m sorry, miss,” said Abe, in great trepidation at having caused his idol one moment’s uneasiness. “You see,” he continued, with simple cunning, “the weather bein’ fine and my partner gone prospectin’, I thought I’d walk up to Hagley’s Hill and round back by the bend, and there I sees you accidental-like and promiscuous a-standin’ on a hillock.” This astounding falsehood was reeled off by the miner with great fluency, and an artificial sincerity which at once stamped it as a fabrication. Bones had concocted and rehearsed it while tracking the little footsteps in the clay, and looked upon it as the very depth of human guile. Miss Carrie did not venture upon a remark, but there was a gleam of amusement in her eyes which puzzled her lover.