On the one side was the driving force of Furies of a myriad hell-power, and on the other the disappointment of Stella Blount. It was ludicrous. Even Walter Herold, who had a sense of humour, did not see the grotesque incongruity. Risca frowned upon each in turn--upon three serene faces smilingly aware of the absurd. Was it worth while trying to convince them? “Our dear friends are quite right, John,” said Herold. “What would become of Stella if you went away?” “None of you seems to consider what would happen to me if I stayed,” said John, in the quiet tone of a man who is talking to charming but unreasonable children. “It will go to my heart to leave Stella, more than any of you can realize; but to Australia I go, and there's an end of it.” Lady Blount sighed. What with imperial governments that wrecked the career of men for shooting a few murderous and fire-raising blacks, and with lowborn vixens of women who ruined men's careers in other ways, life was a desperate puzzle. She was fond of her cousin John Risca. She, too, before she married Sir Oliver, had borne the name, and the disgrace that had fallen upon it affected her deeply. It was horrible to think of John's wife, locked up that night in the stone cell of a gaol. She leaned back in her chair in silence while the men talked--Sir Oliver, by way of giving Risca hints on the conduct of life in Melbourne, was narrating his experiences of forty years ago in the West Indies--and stared into the fire. Her face, beneath the front of red hair that accused so pitifully the reddish gray that was her own, looked very old and faded. What was a prison like? She shuddered. As governor's wife, she had once or twice had occasion to visit a colonial prison. But the captives were black, and they grinned cheerily; their raiment, save for the unæsthetic decoration of the black arrow, was not so very different from that which they wore in a state of freedom; neither were food, bedding, and surroundings so very different; and the place was flooded with air and blazing sunshine. She could never realize that it was a real prison. It might have been a prison of musical comedy. But an English prison was the real, unimaginable abode of grim, gray horror. She had heard of the prison taint. She conceived it as a smell--that of mingled quicklime and the corruption it was to destroy--which lingered physically forever after about the persons of those who had been confined within prison-walls. A gaol was a place of eternal twilight, eternal chill, eternal degradation for the white man or woman; and a white woman, the wife of one of her own race, was there. It was almost as if the taint hung about her own lavender-scented self. She shivered, and drew her chair a few inches nearer the fire.