state.

Gaverick Castle in the province of Connaught, which with the
unproductive lands appertaining to it, had been in the possession of
O'Haras from time immemorial, was sold by Bridget's father to pay his
debts. His brother--the heiress' husband, who, unlike the traditional
spendthrift O'Haras had accumulated a small fortune in business, was
able by some lucky chance to buy back the Castle--partly with his
wife's money--soon after his accession to the barren honours of the
family. His widow inherited the place as well as the rest of her
husband's property, and could do as she pleased with the whole. Thus
the present holder of that ancient Irish title, young, charming and
poor, stemming from a collateral branch, lived mainly upon his friends
and upon the hope that Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, might at her death
leave him the ancestral home and the wherewithal to maintain it.

As for Bridget's father, the last but one Earl of Gaverick, his career
may be summed up as a series of dramatic episodes, matrimonial, social
and financial.

His first wife had divorced him. His second wife--the mother of Lady
Bridget--had deserted him for an operatic tenor and had died shortly
afterwards. She herself had been an Italian singer.

Lord Gaverick did not marry again, and Mrs Gildea had gathered that the
less said about his social adventures the better. Financially, he had
subsisted precariously as a company promoter. There had come a final
smash: and one morning the Earl of Gaverick had been found dead in his
bed, an empty medicine bottle by his side. As he had been in the habit
of taking chloral the Coroner's jury agreed upon the theory of an
overdose.

Yes, Mrs Gildea could quite understand that apart from general views on
the marriage question, Lady Bridget O'Hara might well shrink from
further connection with City finance.

CHAPTER 4

A naughty little gust--herald of the sub-tropical afternoon breeze that
comes up the Leichardt River from the sea, blew about the typed sheets
on the table, and, among them, those of Lady Bridget's letter, as Mrs
Gildea laid them down.

While she collected the various pages of manuscript that had been
displaced and was bundling them together, with a banana on each sheaf
to keep it safe, there came a second snap of the gate and a man's voice
hailed her.

It was the voice of a man who sang baritone, and his accent was an odd
combination of the Bush drawl grafted on to the melliflu