'Now let me see,' she continued, in soliloquy, 'we shall be near Melbourne by the end of this week. Then, for I suppose it would be dangerous for him to wait, I must huddle up a few dresses and be married at once. _Married at once!_' Here she sighed; the light died out of her eyes, and the freshness of the morn seemed to fade out of her face. How different was it from the meeting in Australia which she had promised herself in her more sanguine imaginings! Even if he had been comparatively poor, her fortune would have sufficed for all needs until he was enabled to claim his paternal heritage. But now, how immeasurably worse than poverty was his condition!--disgrace, dishonour,--irrevocable, perhaps inexpiable,--possibly debarring him from ever claiming his rights! She saw herself after the vow had been sworn which bound her to a dishonoured man, a passenger in a foreign vessel, voyaging to a distant land, with perhaps dangers and privations in store of which she had no previous conception. How strange and unreal it all seemed! But it was too late to despond--to falter. She had promised: she would perform. Shrinking with maidenly reluctance from the hasty, and in a measure clandestine, union to which she found herself committed, she felt compelled to call up all the reserves of resolution, of which she had so uncommon a portion, before she could still the instinctive dislike to the next act in the drama of her destiny. * * * * * As these thoughts--sombre, hopeful, and desponding by turns--passed through her brain, the bright spring day wore on; the babbling brooklets, through which their horses plashed ever and anon, ran clear and sparkling. As Estelle Chaloner mused over her surroundings and gazed upwards through the tall white-stemmed eucalypts which, rank upon rank, hemmed in the rugged bridle-track, looked at the trooper, the gold-buyer, the rustic damsel who was to be by day and night her closely associated companion, she could hardly realise her own identity. 'How changed is my _monde_,' she thought, 'in the course of a few short months--my daily thoughts and feelings, my plans of the present, my prospects in the future! Am I indeed the same Estelle Chaloner who sat in the old hall at Wychwood for all the long sad autumn months, who saw the red leaves fall in those ancient woods, waiting the while for the last sands of a sick man's life to run out? And now, where am I? and _what am I_? What I shall be in the future I almost tremble to think.'