and after a bit Trant joined me. Did I tell you that he was a private in my regiment, and a member of the same secret society, sworn to obey orders, as I was? We spent some wild wandering years. We both, as you know, speak French, and we enlisted in an Algerian corps. That didn't last long. The taste for brigandage started in the desert. The adventurous life suited me. There are times when a mad thirst for excitement seizes me, works me to frenzy. At these times I am mad. It's a taint in the Blake blood. It must have an outlet, or I should be in a lunatic asylum. You may take that as one excuse for me. The other is that I am a patriot to the depth of my heart, and that I am sworn to work for my country's freedom. I have robbed—not for greed of gain, but for Ireland."
"Ah!" Elsie drew a panting breath of relief.
"What did I care for mere existence!" he went on. "I tell you that I know no more intense joy than the thrilling sense of carrying one's life in one's hand. If I were taken I should kill myself. I couldn't live the tame round of the ordinary English soldier in time of peace. I was about twenty when I became subject to these recurring fits of excitement—madness, if you like to call them so. I know when they are coming on, and I find vent for them in some desperate adventure—a wild ride, a bushranging escapade—Abatos and I understand each other. We've thrilled together on the moonlight nights as we have galloped along, with the gum trees flying past and the black bunyas closing us within walls of gloom, only the moonbeams shining through the rifts on the track, when we have ridden for our lives through gorges and scrub to the shelter of this cave. You shudder. Yes, it is horrible, I suppose, for a woman to think of the man she loves as a common thief."
"You are not that!" she exclaimed. "But it is horrible; oh! it is horrible."
"Well," he said, "now you understand why, much as I loved you, I could not ask you to link your lot with such a lot as mine."
