found that the Blacks repaid kindness with
ingratitude--treachery--foul murder--' He pulled himself up as though
afraid of losing command of himself if he pursued the subject: his
voice thrilled with some deep-seated feeling. Mrs Gildea, who
understood the personal application, broke in across the table with an
apposite remark about her own early experiences of the Blacks. Lady
Bridget impatiently addressed McKeith.

'Go on. What do the Blacks do now to you people to make you treat them
unkindly?'

'What do they do now--to us squatters you mean?' Colin had recovered
himself. 'Why they begin by spearing our cattle and then they take to
spearing ourselves.'

'Did they ever spear you?' she asked.

Colin smiled at her grimly.

'Well, you wouldn't have noticed, of course, that I've got just a touch
of a limp--it's only if I'm not in my best form that it shows. I owe
that to a spear through my thigh one night that the Blacks rushed my
camp when I was asleep. And I'd given their gins rations that very
morning.'

'And then?' Lady Bridget's voice was tense.

'Oh then--after they'd murdered a white man or two, the rest of us
whites--there wasn't more than a handful of us at that time up on the
Leura--banded together and drove them off into the back country. We had
a dangerous job with those Blacks until King Mograbar was shot down.'

'King Mograbar! How cruelly unjust. It was his country you were
STEALING.' She accentuated the last word with bitter scorn.

'Well! If you come to that, I suppose Captain Cook was stealing when he
hoisted the British flag in Botany Bay,' said McKeith.

'And if he hadn't, what about the glorious British record, and the
March of Civilisation?' put in Vereker Wells.

Bridget shot a scathing glance at the aide-de-camp.

'I don't admire your glorious British record, I think it's nothing but
a record of robbery, murder, and cruelty, beginning with Ireland and
ending with South Africa.'

'Oh! my dear!--I warn you,' said Lady Tallant, bending from her end of
the table and addressing the Leichardt'stonians generally. 'Lady
Bridget is a little Englander, a pro-Boer, a champion of the poor
oppressed native. If she had been alive then she'd have wanted to hand
India back to the Indians after the Mutiny, and now when she has made
Cecil Rhodes Emperor of Rhodesia, she'll give over all the rest again
to the Dutch.'

Bridget responded calmly to the indictment.

'Yes, I would--if Cecil Rhodes were