ace's engineering skill, a bridge of unhewn stone that might have been laid in prehistoric ages by some Australian Titan.
The girl stood framed between two great cedars and outlined against a bit of blue sky. Just here there was a gap in the mountains, and a long narrow flat, on the discovery of which Lord Horace prided himself, curved round a projecting bluff and constituted the freehold of Luya Dell. It was Lord Horace who had christened the place. The girl might have postured as a model for some semi-allegoric Australian statue of Liberty. The cairn of rocks, patched with lichen and the red blossoms of the Kennedia creeper, and tufted with fern, made her a suitable pedestal. She was tall, slender, and lithe of limb, with something of the virginal grace and ease of a Diana, and her clinging holland gown was not an altogether un-goddess-like drapery. She had a red merino scarf twisted round her shoulders and waist, and wore a sort of toque of dark crimson upon her trim little head with its tendril fringe in front and knot of brown curling hair behind. Her face was oval in shape, though the features were not exactly classic. At this moment she looked alert and expectant, her dark eyes were dilated and alight, and her red lips were slightly parted in an eager smile. There was a flush on her soft almost infantine cheek which was of the warm pale tint of a fruit ripened in the shade. She had one arm lifted, and beckoned excitedly to Frank Hallett, whose pulses tingled at the sight of her.
"Stop," she cried, "I want to talk to you."
As if there were any power on earth except that she herself wielded which just then would have kept him from stopping and talking to her! He raised his hat, and put spurs to his horse. He did not trust himself to Lord Horace's bridge, which was in truth intended more for ornament than for use, but splashed through the shallow stream, and scrambled up the steep hill. She watched him leaning forward, raised in the saddle, one hand lightly clutching his horse's mane, his eager face upturned to her. It was an attractive face, bronzed, wholesome, well-featured, with clear
