horse and hurried up to her with outstretched hand and an eager light
in his eyes; "this is a pleasant surprise. I was on my way to see your
father, and when riding along the beach below caught sight of your filly
feeding on the bluff. I knew that it could be no one but you who would
camp here, so instead of going on to Fraser's Gully, I turned off; and
here I am."

"And I am very glad to see you, Mr Forde," said the girl, as she shook
hands; "now, will you have something to eat? I have plenty of Fraser's
Gully fare here--beef and damper--and I've tea and sugar in my
saddle-bag."

"So have I. And now, whilst I light a fire, tell what brought you here
to-day? To look at the sea--the 'ever treacherous sea'--I suppose, and
'wish you were a man,'" and the speaker smiled into the brown eyes.

"You are very rude, Mr Forde; the rudest clergyman I ever met Certainly,
I've only met three in my life, but then----" Here the brown eyes lit up
laughingly. "They were different from you."

"I have no doubt about it," and the man laughed like a boy, as taking up
some dead sticks he broke them across his knee. "But you haven't told me
how it is I am so fortunate as to find you here--fifteen miles off the
track to Fraser's Gully."

"Oh! the old story. Some of our horses are missing, and I have been
trying to pick up their tracks."

Forde, with an earnest look in his blue eyes, looked up from the fire he
was kindling, and shook his head gravely. "You should not venture so far
away, Miss Fraser. How can you tell but that whilst you are trying to
pick up the horses' tracks that the blacks about Repulse Bay are not now
engaged in picking up yours?"

"Oh, I am not afraid of any of the myalls{*} about Whitsunday Passage
and Repulse Bay, Mr Forde. I really believe that if I rode into one of
their camps they would not bolt. Poor wretches! I do feel sorry for
them when I know how they are harried and shot down--so often without
cause--by the Native Police. Oh, I hate the Native Police! How is it,
Mr Forde, that the Government of this colony can employ these uniformed
savages to murder--I call it murder--their own race? Every time I see
a patrol pass, I shudder; their fierce, insolently-evil faces, and the
horrid way they show the whites of their eyes when they ride by with
their Snider carbines by their sides, looking at every tame black with
such a savage, supercilious hatred! And their white officers--oh,
how can any man who pretends