hing-rod and basket
from a peg on the rough, timbered sides of the sitting-room.

"Fill your pipe, dad, before we start."

"Fill it for me, Miss," and Fraser threw a piece of tobacco upon the
table, together with his pocket-knife.

"And yours too, Mr Gerrard. I am a great hand at cutting up tobacco;
I wish I were a man, and could smoke it. Oh, Mr Gerrard, I'm 'all of a
quiver' to know that I shall see your little Mary."

"So am I, 'quite a quivering," and then as Gerrard looked at her
beautiful face, he remembered his own scarred features, and something
between a sigh and a curse came from his lips.

CHAPTER XIX

As Mrs Westonley had told Gerrard in her letter that she and Mary would
not leave Marumbah for quite two months and proceed direct to Somerset,
where she hoped he would meet them, he decided to lose no more time at
Port Denison; and so a week after the abandonment of Fraser's Gully, he
and his friends found themselves on board a steamer bound to the most
northern port of the colony, just then coming into prominence as the
rendezvous of the pearling fleet, although Thursday Island was also much
favoured.

Before leaving Port Denison, he had written to his sister, and told her
that he would meet her on her arrival at Somerset. "Jim is off his head
with delight," he added; "in fact we both are, at the prospect of seeing
you and Mary so soon. In one way I am glad that it will be barely three
months before you get to Ocho Rios, for I want to get a new house put
up; the present one isn't of much account"--this was his modified way of
saying that there was no house there at all, it having been reduced to
ashes, but he did not wish her to have the faintest inkling of any
of his misfortunes, for fear that she would then refuse to add to his
troubles and expenses by becoming a charge upon him. "And I have already
bought some decent furniture, which I will take round with me in one of
the pearlers. I do hope you will like the place, but you will look upon
it at its very worst, for there have been heavy bush fires all about
the station, which have played the deuce with the country for hundred of
miles about. But the annual rains will begin to fall in four months, and
then you will see it at its best. I am also going to make a garden, and
plant no end of vegetables and flowers and things. There is a lovely
little spot on one of the creeks; and Jim and I have been going over
a thumping big box of seeds which I