eyes frank and straight looking, a pleasant smile, dark brown whiskers and moustache, and a square-cut shaven chin. He looked a typical bushman, with a little more polish than one associates with the typical bushman—had the bushman's seat, and the bushman's sinewy sapling-like figure.
But the girl did not admire the typical bushman. She would have preferred the product of a more complex civilization. In this she resembled what indeed she was, the typical Australian girl. She had not a very varied experience of the human product of a complex civilization. Her reading convinced her that she must not generalize by the specimens that drifted to Australia, and of which her own brother-in-law was an example. When she was in a discontented mood she always brought herself into a state of resignation by reflecting that nothing would have induced her to marry Lord Horace Gage.
"Of course I might have married him if I had chosen to cut Ina out," Elsie Valliant had always said to herself, with the complacent vanity of a spoiled beauty. "But one must remember that there's honour among thieves, and besides he is too great a bore for any one to put up with but Ina, who is a placid angel."
To be sure, if Lord Horace had been the heir to the Marquisate, instead of the youngest of many scantily portioned younger sons, Elsie might have altered her mind, for she had the reputation of being a very worldly and a very heartless young lady. At any rate, this was what her rejected admirers declared.
"He really is good-looking," she thought now, as she watched Frank Hallett. And she added:
"It is such a pity that he is—only Frank Hallett."
"Tell me, have you met Braile?" she questioned anxiously, as he pulled up his panting horse and flung himself from the saddle.
"Braile—the postman? No, I've been out on the run. I left Tunimba early."
"That's a pity," said the girl. "He is brimful of news
