ever seen, the blessed beak said. Well, it were clear like the three-card-trick is clear. It wer’n’t fair, and I am sorry for it, only that Joe Aarons shouldn’t have come down with his hundred. I always had a weakness for a lump sum. It was the only time I ever went wrong while I was working for them. But bless yer, as soon as I began to do a bit of buying again on my own account, they are down on me, and I, like a fool, cleared for this country. I’d have done better to have stopped in Kimberley and done my sentence. I see that as soon as I come across that devil Colerado,” the man said in a husky, quavering voice.

Darrell managed to get a border magistrate to come up and take the deposition before Seers died. With this evidence he easily got his sentence quashed. After that he had gone back to the river, where he did fairly well, and putting what he made at the river into some claims in one of the mines, just before a sudden rise in their value, he managed to make a fairly good thing of it.

“I have to thank you for everything. I should still be wearing convict’s clothes if it had not been for you. I have felt ashamed of myself when I have thought how I rode off and left you to get out of the trouble you might have got into how you could. I never could hear what happened to you after the trial. I have been longing to thank you,” he said, when he had come to the end of his story.

“My trouble was not very great,” she said; and she began to think that it would have been better if she had never met him again. She remembered their last conversation.

“I have wanted to tell you something. You remember when we last talked to one another on the road up to the Fields. That story I told you of is all over; the person I told you about then is dead.”

Their minds both went back to that conversation on the veldt, and they took up their story as it had been left off then. Before it was time for Darrell to say good-bye, they had settled how it was to end.