'A banker and two miners! Chiefly young and unmarried, I suppose. And are these all your introductions in a strange town, and that town Ballarat, you dear innocent lamb that you are? Well, well; we have five days before us. Mr. Vernon will be home to dinner at seven, and we can have a council of war. Here comes afternoon tea, after which we go for a drive if you are not tired.' 'I am not in the least tired,' replied Estelle. 'And now that my departure is decided upon I am ready for anything.' So the carriage was ordered out--a costly enough equipage in those days of unexampled enhancement of prices--the three-hundred-guinea pair of horses that consumed oats at twelve shillings a bushel and hay at seventy pounds a ton, driven by a coachman at three pounds a week. But Mr. Vernon was a merchant who had made one fortune by the lucky cargoes of mining necessaries, and was fast making another by gold-buying. Such an additional item of expense as a carriage for his wife was the merest bagatelle. So the ladies drove to St. Kilda for a breath of sea air, taking the Botanic Gardens on their way back, where there was a flower-show patronised by His Excellency, Mr. Latrobe, and all the rank and fashion of the metropolis, chiefly represented by a few squatters and club men, with a sprinkling of gold commissioners on leave. Mrs. Vernon was not averse to the company of so distinctly aristocratic-looking a damsel as Estelle Chaloner, whose appearance, quietly dressed as she was, elicited, in that day of matrimonial competition and proportional scarcity of young ladies, endless admiring comment. At dinner, for which they had barely time to dress, they were enlivened by the society of Mr. Vernon--a shrewd, good-humoured mercantile personage--and a gentleman whom he introduced as Mr. Annesley and described as a Goldfields Commissioner. This last was a very good-looking and correctly dressed young man, not long from England. He was in Melbourne, on leave after twelve months' hard work on the diggings, according to his own account, and had some flavour of the high spirits and abounding cheerfulness of the naval officer on shore about him. His host 'drew' him judiciously about mining life and adventure, on which he was by no means loath to enlarge. He was evidently gratified by the intense interest with which Estelle listened to his amusing and justifiably egotistic rattle, and in the innocence of his heart essayed to complete her subjugation. But, to Estelle's intense regret, he did not come from Ballarat--'had been quartered in quite a different district.' She was deeply interested in him, however, as marking a type with which Lance must necessarily have often come into contact, and she concluded an agreeable evening, widely different from her expectation of things Australian, with an assurance from Mr. Vernon that he would bring her a budget of definite information about Ballarat and its social condition on the morrow.