watched in silence while she crossed two paddocks, leaped two
sets of slip-rails, and disappeared as a small dot of white
handkerchief from the sun-suffused landscape.

"What riding!" Guthrie Carey ejaculated, under his breath.

"She's the best horsewoman in the country," Jim Urquhart commented
slowly, after a still pause.

He was a slow--to some people a dull and heavy--man, who talked little,
and less of Deborah Pennycuick than of any subject in the world--his
world.

"And what a howling beauty!" the sailor added, in the same whisper of
awe.

Again the bushman spoke, muttering deeply in his beard: "She is as good
as she is beautiful."

Mrs Urquhart took her levelled hand from her eyes, and turned to
contribute her testimony.

"There, Mr Carey, goes the flower of the Western District. You won't
find her match amongst the best in England. I was with her mother when
she was born--not a soul else--and put her into her first clothes, that
I helped to make; and a bonny one she was, even then, with her black
eyes, that stared up at me as much as to say: 'Who are you, I'd like to
know?' Dear, it seems like yesterday, and it's nigh twenty years ago.
All poor Sally Pennycuick's girls are good girls, and the youngest is
going to be handsome too. Rose, the third, is not at all bad-looking;
poor Mary--I don't know who she takes after. The father was the one
with the good looks; but Sally was a fine woman too. Poor dear old
Sally! I wish she was here to see that girl."

Mrs Urquhart and Mrs Pennycuick, plain, brave, working women of the
rough old times, wives of high-born husbands, incapable of companioning
them as they companioned each other, had been great friends. On them
had devolved the drudgery of the pioneer home-making without its
romance; they had had, year in, year out, the task of 'shepherding' two
headstrong and unthrifty men, who neither owned their help nor thanked
them for it--the inglorious life-work of so many obscure women--and had
strengthened each other's hands and hearts that had had so little other
support.

"Mrs. Pennycuick--she is not living, I presume?" Guthrie enticed the
garrulous lady to proceed.

"Dear, no. She died when Francie was a baby," and Mrs Urquhart gave the
details of her friend's last illness in full. "Deb was just a little
trot of a thing--her father's idol; he wouldn't allow her mother to
correct her the least bit, though she was a wilful puss, with a temper
of her own; ruled