f her lover, with a sharpened flake of flint.

The young woman, as she sucked her lead-pencil, was quite unconscious that
the boulder thought at all. She wrote in an unformed hand, and in letters
that began by being large and round, and tailed off into a slanting
niggle. "W. Keyse, Esquer." Then she bit the pencil awhile, and dreamed
dreams. Then she wrote again, "Jane Keyse" and "Mrs. W. Keyse," and
blushed furiously, and then grew pale again in anticipation of the Awful
Ordeal to come. For she had made up her mind to tell him all, and chance
it.

Yesterday had been his birthday. She had sent him, per John Tow, a costly
gift. The four-ounce packet of honeydew, cheap at five dollars in these
days of scarcity, had been opened, and the new pipe filled. A slip of
paper coquettishly intimated that the sender had rendered the recipient
this delicate little service. She meant to sign "Jane Harris," but her
courage failed her, and her trembling pen faltered for the last time,
"Fare Air."

Oh! how she hated that Other One, whom, perhaps, he liked the best, though
he had never kissed her! She would be done with the creature, she thanked
her Gawd, after to-day! Oh, how many times she had made up her mind to
tell him the truth, and never done it! But if she took and died of it,
tell him she would this time.

How would he take the revelation? Possibly swearing. Probably he would be
angry enough to hit her, _when he knew_. If he only would, and make it up
afterwards! Oh! how cruel she did suffer! She thought she would not tell
him just yet. It was too hard. And then it seemed quite easy, and then she
cried out in agony: "Is that 'im comin'? Oh, my Gawd, it is!"

She clasped her hands over a brand-new blowse, with something under it
that jumped and fluttered orful. Mother used to 'ave such palpitytions
when her and father 'ad 'ad what you might call a jar. And he was coming,
coming....

Surely W. Keyse looked stern and imposingly tall of stature, seen from her
lower level, as he appeared among the blue gum-trees on the top of the
bank, and began to descend into the ferny gorge where the great boulder
sat and sunned himself beside the beer-coloured river, whose barbel kept
on rising at the flies. Something W. Keyse dragged behind him, not by a
rope, but by a pigtail; an animated bundle of clean blue cotton, topped by
the impassive, almond-eyed countenance of John Tow, the letter-carrying
Chinaman, who in the unlawful pursuit of