ng eyes.

"My wife wants a companion for the voyage," he was saying. "So that will
cost you nothing, but if anything the other way, and once in London,
I'll be answerable. I've adjudicated these things for years to voices
not in the same class as yours. But the worst of it is you won't stay
with us."

"I will."

"No; they'll want you at Covent Garden before we know where we are. And
when you are ready to go to them, go you must."

"I shall do what you tell me."

"Then speak to Mrs. Clarkson at once."

Hilda Bouverie glanced over her shoulder, but her employers had left the
building. Her smile was less roguish than demure.

"There is no need, Sir Julian. Mrs. Clarkson has already spoken to me,
though only in a whisper. But I am to take myself off by the next
coach."

The Black Hole of Glenranald

It was coming up the Murrumbidgee that Fergus Carrick first heard the
name of Stingaree. With the cautious enterprise of his race, the young
gentleman had booked steerage on a river steamer whose solitary
passenger he proved to be; accordingly he was not only permitted to
sleep on the saloon settee at nights, but graciously bidden to the
captain's board by day. It was there that Fergus Carrick encouraged
tales of the bushrangers as the one cleanly topic familiar in the mouth
of the elderly engineer who completed the party. And it seemed that the
knighthood of the up-country road had been an extinct order from the
extirpation of the Kellys to the appearance of this same Stingaree, who
was reported a man of birth and mystery, with an ostentatious passion
for music and as romantic a method as that of any highwayman of the Old
World from which he hailed. But the callow Fergus had been spared the
romantic temperament, and was less impressed than entertained with what
he heard.

On his arrival at Glenranald, however, he found that substantial
township shaking with laughter over the outlaw's latest and least
discreditable exploit, at the back-block hamlet of Yallarook; and then
it was that young Carrick first conceived an ambition to open his
Colonial career with the capture of Stingaree; for he was a serious
immigrant, who had come out in his teens, to stay out, if necessary, for
the term of his natural life.

The idea had birth under one of the many pine trees which shaded the
skeleton streets of budding Glenranald. On this tree was nailed a
placard offering high reward for the bushranger's person alive or dead