"But if they did apply to me?—if I was thinking, speaking of myself?"
"How can that be? You are free. Your life is your own."
"It is true," he said slowly, "that my life is my own. But it is true also that my life may be forfeited at any moment, and that I am not free to link the life of a woman like you with a career so wild and precarious as mine."
"Wild! precarious!" she repeated, in wonder.
"You don't know what I mean. It is not possible that you should. I am saying to you what I have said to no other woman in the world—to no other person in Australia. My life is wild and precarious—it is not necessary, not advisable, that you should understand in what way. Only understand this—I am the last man to ask a woman I love to share it."
"I understand," she said—"no, I shall never understand, but I know what you wish to convey to me. I thank you for your warning. It was not needed. Will you show me now where the horses are?"
CHAPTER XV.
A VERANDAH RECEPTION.
It seemed to Elsie that never in all her life long should she forget that moonlight ride. The sun was setting when they found the horses. They waited a little while in, as far as Blake and Elsie were concerned, a constrained silence. Elsie talked to Pompo and the black boys. She was a favourite with the blacks, and had picked up something of the Luya dialect. King Tommy of the Dell had been her instructor, and King Tommy was old and garrulous, and had even been beguiled into discussing the sacred mysteries of the Bora. Elsie had a theory that the most sacred initia-
