le. Mr. Radford's running
criticism on the performers, always pungent, was often amusing, while
Mr. Hack lost no opportunity of advancing his own ideals in the matter
of musical entertainment.

"A song and dance," said he, again and again, with a more and more
sepulchral deviltry--"a song and dance is what you want. You should have
heard the Sisters Belton in their palmy days at the Pav! You don't get
the best of everything out here, you know, Ted!"

"No; let's hope they've got some better men than you," returned
Radford, inspired by the quorum of three to make mince-meat of his
friend.

It was the interval between parts one and two. The platform was
unoccupied. A cool draught blew through the iron building from open door
to open door; there was no occasion to go outside. They had done so,
however, at the lower end; there was a sudden stampede of returning
feet. A something in the scuffling steps, a certain outcry that
accompanied them, caused Miss Bouverie and her companions to turn their
heads; they turned again at as sudden a jingle on the platform, and the
girl caught her breath. There stood her missing hero, smiling on the
people, dapper, swarthy, booted, spurred, and for one moment the man she
had reason to remember, exactly as she remembered him. The next his
folded arms sprang out from the shoulders, and a brace of long-barrelled
revolvers covered the assembly.

"Up with your hands, every man of you!" he cried. "No, not the ladies,
but every man and boy who doesn't want a bullet in his brain!"

The command was echoed in uncouth accents at the lower door, where, in
fact, a bearded savage had driven in all and sundry at his pistol's
point. And in a few seconds the meeting was one which had carried by
overwhelming show of hands a proposition from which the ladies alone
saw occasion to dissent.

"You may have heard of me before," said the man on the platform,
sweeping the forest of hands with his eye-glass. "My name's Stingaree."

It was the word which Hilda Bouverie had heard on the veranda and taken
for some strange expletive.

"Who is he?" she asked, in a whisper that bespoke excitement, agitation,
but not alarm.

"The fancy bushranger--the dandy outlaw!" drawled Radford, in cool
reply. "I've been expecting him. He was seen on our run the day Mrs.
Clarkson went down to Melbourne."

That memorable day for Hilda Bouverie! And it was this manner of man who
had been her hero ever since: a bushranger, an