"There's only one thing that troubles me," the man was saying (though his twitching, restless face was an eternal sea of trouble and remorse), "and that is your poor old major. He has turned up trumps" ("I'm damned if he has," muttered the major behind the leaves), "and it does seem a shame. I fear the other night you must have led him on." "I did," replied the woman, with a groan for which she received no credit. "I did--I could not help it. It grieves me to think of it; I am so ashamed; but, darling, it was for you!" "Was it indeed?" cried the major, striding into the room with sounding heels and jingling spurs; and he stood there twirling his moustache. The woman was first upon her feet. The man's face sank into his hands. "It was," she repeated boldly. "And oh, sir, even you will forgive me when I tell you all!" "Naturally," sneered the other--"if I stopped to listen. But explanations I imagine would be somewhat superfluous after this. Here, you may have it," he added, opening his hand and letting the crumpled ticket drop with an air of ineffable contempt. "I won't condescend to put it back in my pocket, as you deserve; take it--and marry the man, for God's sake, at the nearest church!" The woman laid a tender hand upon the bowed and bended head at which Thomas Blacker glanced in righteous scorn. "Marry him I cannot," said she. "We have been married these fifteen years." AFTER THE FACT I It is my good fortune to cherish a particularly vivid recollection of the town of Geelong. Others may have found the place so dull as to justify an echo of the cheap local sneer at its expense; to me those sloping parallels of low houses have still a common terminus in the bluest of all Australian waters; and I people the streets, whose very names I have forgotten, with faces of extraordinary kindness, imperishable while memory holds her seat. Even had it bored me, I for one should have good reason to love Geelong. It was my lot, however, not only to happen upon the town in a week of unique excitement, but, thanks to one of those chance meetings which are the veriest commonplace of outlandish travel, to have a finger in the pother. I arrived by the boat on a Monday afternoon, to find the streets crowded and peace disturbed by a sudden run on one of the banks. On the Wednesday, another bank, which had notoriously received much of the money withdrawn from the Barwon Banking Company, Limited, was in its turn the victim of a still uglier fate: the Geelong branch of the Intercolonial was entered in broad daylight by a man masked and armed to the beard, who stayed some ten minutes, and then walked into thin air with no less a sum than nineteen thousand and odd pounds in notes and gold.