d not gone far, but they could not follow
them up that day. They spent it in the shade down by the waterhole, and
Turner did not try to break his companion's silent reverie. Then when
their horses were recruited they set out for the head-station of Nilpe
Nilpe. There they told their tale. It was not much of a tale after all.
Only a half-caste girl murdered, and a hut burnt. Such things
happen every day. But the blacks must be punished, nevertheless, and
half-a-dozen men rode out to do it, Stanesby at their head.

He was very silent. They said at the station, coming into a fortune had
made him stuck-up and too proud to speak to a fellow, only Turner put
a different construction on his silence. And the vengeance he took
was heavy. They rode down among that tribe at bright noonday, led by
Stanesby's black boy, who had been one of themselves, and when evening
fell it was decimated, none left but a few scattered frightened wretches
crouching down among the scanty cover in the creek bed, knowing full
well that to show themselves but for a moment was to court death swift
and certain. So they avenged Dick Stanesby's hutkeeper.

They count Dick Stanesby a good fellow in his county. He is a just
landlord, well beloved by his tenants. He is a magistrate and stanchly
upholds law and order; and withal he is a jolly good fellow, whose
hunting breakfasts are the envy and admiration of the surrounding
squires. His wife is pretty too, somewhat insipid perhaps, but a model
wife and mother, and always sweet and amiable.

There have been found men who were Goths enough to object to Mrs.
Stanesby's innocent, loving prattle about her eldest boy and her third
girl, and the terrible time they had when her second little boy had the
measles, and they were so terrified for the first twenty-four hours lest
it should turn to scarlet fever; there have been men, I say, who
have objected to this as "nursery twaddle," but their womenkind have
invariably crushed them. They believe in Mrs. Stanesby and in Dick
Stanesby too.

"Their story is too sweet," says Ethel De Lisle, his sister's
sister-in-law. "It reminds one that the chivalry of the olden times has
not yet died out among true Englishmen. Only think, he loved silently
because he was too poor to speak. He went away to Australia, and he
worked and waited there all among the blacks and all sorts of low
people, and at the end of four years, when his cousin died and left him
Heyington, he came back