with ladies, being a good match and a sociable person who got up races and picnic parties in slack times, and liked to amuse himself and other people, and he was vaguely known in the colony as a man of promise. He had been mentioned in the newspapers and publicly congratulated by the Governor on having taken high honours at the Sydney University, and was considered a person likely to distinguish himself in politics. He had gone through one election, and had been beaten with credit. Since then he had been biding his time and hoping that the Luya constituency might fall vacant. Yesterday there had seemed little prospect of this being the case. Now, in a few moments after the first shock of a tragic disclosure, he saw himself member for Luya, and at no very distant date leader of the Opposition in the Leichardt's Land Assembly.
The disclosure was made by a girl.
The girl was standing on a point of rock above the steep bank, at what was called Lord Horace's Crossing. Lord Horace's homestead, Luya Dell, lay behind her. The girl was Lord Horace's wife's sister. The crossing was one of Lord Horace's fads.
He had wasted a great deal of money and labour in making it more beautiful than Nature had already done, and that was quite unnecessary, for Nature had not been niggardly in her provisions.
It was a creek flowing down one of the many gorges of Mount Luya. The creeklet ran between high banks, mostly of grey lichen-covered rock—banks which curved in and out, making caves and hollows where ferns, and parasites, and rock lilies, and aromatic smelling shrubs grew in profusion—banks that sometimes shelved upward, and sometimes hung sheer, and sometimes broke into bastion-like projections or into boulders lying pell-mell, and it seemed only kept from crashing down by the binding withes of a creeper, or the twisted trunk of a chestnut tree or crooked gum. Then there were mysterious pools with an iridescent film upon their surface and dank beds of arums and fallen logs and rugged causeways, and the triumph of Lord Hor-
