Bible,' if they could have the rest of the day for their usual
Sunday recreations--euchre or kangarooing. I never thought Lizzie would
turn out to be a crank, but a crank she is, and I'm afraid Westonley is
not at all a happy man, though he yields to her in almost everything.

"Your mother has not been at all well for the post six months. She will
be very lonely when Mary leaves the house, and you must come to us for
a month or two next year; 'twill cheer her up. She doesn't want
Lizzie--neither do I; she'd depress a dead bull calf, by just looking at
him."

And then within a twelvemonth, came the tragedy of the Gerrard family.

Captain Gerrard, by Dr Rayner's advice, decided to take his wife to
Sydney to consult a specialist, and Rayner went with them. They took
passage on a coastal steamer named the _Cassowary_--a small paddle-wheel
vessel of three hundred tons, old, ill-found, and utterly unable to cope
with the savage easterly gale that met her as she rounded Cape Howe, and
doots north for Sydney.

A fortnight later, Mary Rayner, as she was putting her two months' old
baby girl to sleep, was called from her bedroom to see a stranger in the
sitting-room. He was a stockman from a station seventy miles away on the
coast.

He silently handed her a letter, and then turned away, She opened and
read it. It was from die Police Inspector of the Cape Howe district, and
in a few sympathetic words told her that the _Cassowary_ had been lost
near Cape Howe, and that every soul on board but one seaman and a child
of four years of age had perished, and that her husband, her father and
her mother had been buried three days previously.

She never survived the shock, and when Tom Gerrard made his long journey
down from North Queensland to Victoria, to comfort and aid his loved
sister, he found that she had died a month before.

It took some months to settle up Captain Gerrard's affairs. He had made
a will devising his head station to his wife, together with (less a
certain reservation) the sum of ten thousand pounds. His two other
stations--one in Central Queensland, and the other in the Far North
of that colony,--he bequeathed, the former to his "dear daughter, Mary
Rayner" and the latter to his "son, Thomas Gerrard, together with such
moneys as might be at his (the testator's) death, lying to the credit
of the two stations." Then--and here came the sting of the "certain
reservation" to Elizabeth Westonley--to his "dearly est