all that had gone
before, though those were negative offences, and this was a positive
affront.

It was when at last the store door opened, and Rigden went over to the
kitchen for something steaming in a pannikin, and then to his room for
something else. He passed once under Moya's nose, and once close beside
her chair, but on each occasion without a look or a word.

"Something is worrying him," she thought. "Poor fellow!"

And for a space her heart softened. But it was no space to speak of;
intensified curiosity cut it very short.

"Who can the horrid man be?"

The question paved the way to a new grievance and a new resolve.

"He ought to have told me. But he shall!"

Meanwhile the dividing door was once more shut; and now the better part
of an hour had passed; and the only woman on the station (she might
remain the only woman) had carried tea through the verandah and advised
Moya to go indoors and begin. Moya declined. But no one ever sat in the
sun up there. Moya said nothing; but at length gave so short an answer
to so natural a question that Mrs. Duncan retreated with a very natural
impression, false for the moment, but not for so many moments more.

For presently through the handful of pines, red-stemmed and resinous in
the sunset, there came the jingle of bit and stirrup, to interrupt the
unworthiest thoughts in which the insulted lady had yet indulged. She
was thinking of much that she had missed in town by coming up-country in
the height of the season; she was wishing herself back in Toorak. There
she was somebody; in Toorak, in Melbourne, they would not dare to treat
her thus.

Her fate was full of irony. There she could have had anybody, and,
rightly or wrongly, she was aware of the fact. No other girl down
there--or in Melbourne, for that matter--was at once a society belle, a
general favourite, and a Bethune. The latter titles smacked indeed of
the contradiction in terms, but their equal truth merely emphasised the
altogether exceptional character of our heroine. That she was herself
aware of it was not her fault. She had heard so much of her qualities
for so many years. But all her life it had been impressed upon her mind
that the Bethunes, as a family, were in a class by themselves in the
southern hemisphere. In moments of chagrin, therefore, it was only
natural that Moya should aggravate matters by remembering that she also
was a Bethune.

A Bethune engaged to a bushman who dared to treat he