For once she talked to him; as a rule she liked better to listen, with large eyes intent and sympathetic lips apart--ever ready with the helpful word. But to-day she was wishful to entertain, to take him out of himself, to console without letting him suspect that she knew as much as he had told her mother. In a sense she knew more, for Lady Caroline had duly exaggerated his frank confession; and the girl's heart bled for her friend, on the brink of a disillusion without parallel in her knowledge. So she told him of her life in town and elsewhere; of the treadmill round of toilsome pleasure; of the penance of dressing and smiling with unflagging prettiness; of the hollow friendships and hollower loves of that garish life, and the unutterable staleness of the whole conventional routine. No doubt she overstated her case; and certainly her strictures were themselves conventional; but she was perfectly aware of both facts, and would have been exceedingly sorry to have had this conversation recorded against her. Olivia had a healthy horror of superiority, either of the moral or the intellectual order. But she was conducting a conversation with an obvious purpose; and it was only when he told her again, and more earnestly than before, how suited she was for the bush, that she proposed the canter which brought them a mile nearer Devenholme. "Now it's you to play," she told him as they drew rein; "and I want to hear some of your adventures. You've never told us any, yet you must have had heaps. So far I've only heard about the hut, the sheep, the homestead, and your old boss." "A white man!" cried Jack. "I wish you knew him." "So do I; but I can quite picture him, and just now I would much rather hear about some of your own adventures. So begin." Jack laughed. "Really, Miss Sellwood, I never had one in my life!" "Then really, my Lord Duke, I can't believe a word----" Jack was laughing no more. "Don't call me that," he said. "It would be so much kinder to call me Jack!" She had forgotten. Her heart smote her now, and the difficulty was to conceal her unsuspected sympathy. So she insisted on his calling her Olivia, to conclude the bargain. And the double innovation made them both so self-conscious, that she forgot her thirst for his adventures, while he brooded heavily upon his bitter-sweet advancement won loo late.