"Yes; I admire and respect him above all men whom I know, next my father. He certainly does seem at times,' I continued with a thoughtful and puzzled air, "to have boiled up his Bible, Old Testament and New, Jeremiah and Revelations, into a sort of broth that's too strong for my poor stomach. But he is a very noble person, old girl. Look at what we know of his life, and look at his work this last two days. Yes, I admire and love. Trevittick."

I was frowning, deep in thought. Could he be right? Had Arkwright been mad enough to put to sea? If he had been such a fool as to do so in the face of the sulky mercury, I should be answerable for my sister's death, because I told him of that miserable little earthquake which Trevittick and I had heard on the mountain. That is the way in which men think in hurricanes.

"But," I heard my wife rambling on, "God would never do such a thing as that, you know. You may depend on it

Why, that the day of judgment was come, and that the last trump would sound as soon as the wind changed. I am particularly glad that you don't believe that."

I don't know what made me ask her, "Why?"

"Because I am so happy, dear. If I were to lose you or baby, I wouldn't mind so much, though there is a good deal to be thought about, and a good deal that would be very disagreeable under any circumstances. My dear, one night at Camden Town, when you had kept me out late, and I caught it, I perfectly well remember wishing Mrs.

Jackson in heaven and out of the reach of temptation. Now that doesn't matter talking of between us two, but it is not the sort of thing you would like to say in public. No; I want to have you a few years longer. I am glad you don't believe what Trevittick said."

trouble your head about her. She will be well cared for wherever she goes."

And then the words of Trevittick came ringing in my ears again—“This world is not the place of punishment and reward: this world is not the place of punishment and reward." Was I to be driven mad by my own wife and a half-lunatic Cornishman?

CHAPTER LXXX.

JAMES BURTON'S STORY: NO ANSWER.

THE storm passed away towards the great interior, cracking the stunted forests, and lashing the lonely lakes into sheets of foam; and so it died in the desert, for it never reached Timor. The brisk south-west wind came up, and nature looked beautiful once more, as though trying, while the ruin of her Berserk fit was still lying around us, to make us forget that she ever could be cruel.

It was early on one of these crystal, clear mornings, which one would rashly say only existed in Australia, did one not reflect that one is abroad by daylight there, and lies in bed till the day is warmed here on a breezy, fresh morning, when the air seems to sparkle like champagne : that Erne and I got on our horses, and rode south to meet the mail.

I had I cannot tell you why, or how; fully and entirely persuaded myself that Arkwright had never been such a fool as to put to sea. What was better still, I had persuaded Erne so; and we were

both in good spirits. A natural reaction, after the horrors of the last three days, had set in, and we rode swiftly and cheerfully on, without a single misgiving as to the result of our journey.

The ruins of the storm were around us in every direction, and those ruins showed us, inexperienced as we were, that it had been the greatest storm for a hundred years.

In some places whole tracts of forest were levelled; in others the trees had fallen until they had formed a screen for the wind, supported by unfallen trees to the leeward; but everywhere there was nothing but ruin and desolation. I learnt the lesson, that in so new, and so little known a country, so near the terrible tropics, great allowances should be made for great natural disturbances. I thought of the story of Gundagai, on the Morumbidgee, where the black fellows, on being asked to show the highest floodmarks, pointed to the tops of the tallest trees. The government surveyor laughed at them, and laid out the town. The few survivors of that disaster lived to tell how the river rose sixty feet in a single night.

So we went southward. Half way to Pitt, the first important town, we met my youngest brother, Fred, who, by some original line of thought, had arrived at the conclusion that the hurricane had given him an indefeasible right to run away from school, borrow a horse, and come northward, to see how we were getting on.

We took him back with us, and reached Pitt that night. Fred's report was right. The destruction at Pitt was scarcely less than that at Romilly; but the wind had come on more gradually, with deluges of rain; so there had been no fire. Pitt had been blown to ruins piecemeal, but the destruction of Romilly had been sudden, terrible, and unexpected. Erne pointed out this " conceit" to me next morning, as we rode southward. Harry, whom we had picked up after depositing Fred, riding with us, wondered why we laughed so boisterously at so poor a joke.

It was because a growing terror was

on us of the news the mail would bring-a terror which neither of us would allow, even to himself, to exist, and which grew yet stronger as we went on. The boy Harry, who knew nothing of the state of the case, who was utterly unaware of our anxieties, went on prattling his beautiful nonsense, and kept us from thinking. But sometimes he would tattle about Emma, of some money he had saved to buy her a birthday present; of a bowerbird's nest which he had kept for her; of a hymn he had learnt to sing to her. Whenever he spoke of her I raised my hand, till at last the boy drew his horse back, and called to me.

"Why do you

I went back to him. raise your hand when I speak of Emma?" he said. "Is she dead?" "No, my boy. Erne is going to marry her; and he has been ill. I don't know why. Talk of anything else; don't talk of her just now."

The boy lingered after this; I had made him uneasy, and he talked no

more.

We were going through some beautiful low wooded ranges: ranges which were only a succession of abrupt rocky hills and valleys in the forest, whose height and depth were so small that they were insignificant beneath the gigantic timber. The road, winding through and over them, never showed us a prospect of more than a few hundred yards: and, going up one of the little valleys, more beautiful than most; for it had been sheltered from the storm, and the trees were untouched, and the tall spikes of heather were blossoming fair and free; here we came on the mail. It was only a scarlet dog-cart, driven tandem, but it seemed to me more terrible than a loaded cannon, about to unlimber and begin firing.

We knew the truth in two minutes. The Wainoora had sailed, just as Trevittick had said, on the 11:30 tide on Saturday. "Worse luck," said my friend, the mail-man, but I interrupted him. I would have it all out. Now or never. "Was my sister aboard, Tom?" "Yes, Miss Burton were aboard,"

said he, looking at me for one instant, and then looking at his horses. "Oh, yes, your sister were aboard, Mr. James. Likewise Mrs. Clayton along with her. Miss Burke, she weren't on board, for I see her come back along the pier, and box a boy's ears in front of Colton and Martin's. No more were Mrs. Huxtable on board, for she is in bed with twins. And Sam Corry's wife, she weren't aboard, for I see her buying a umberreller in Bass Street arterwards. But Miss Burton, yes, she were aboard, because I see her standing between Captain Arkwright and Mrs. Clayton, as the boat went down the river, waving her hand, good-bye, to Miss Burke."

The man drove on, and I turned to Harry. "Ride home and tell him what you have heard." The boy turned pale, and went silently.

"We had better head for the coast, Erne."

There was no answer, but we did so. In an hour or less, riding down a stormruined glen, we came suddenly upon the broad, cruel, beautiful sea-blue, sparkling, laughing, rejoicing under a swift south-easterly breeze, and a bright

summer sun.

We turned our horses' heads southward, along the sands which fringed the ocean. I mean the ocean. How insignificant the shores of the narrow seas appear to one who has seen, and has not had time to forget, the broad, desolate seaboard which girds the ocean. Its breadth and the eternal thunder of the ground-swell of the rollers, which, in the calmest summer weather, make human life impossible on the margin of the great volume of water, point out the difference between it and the shores of smaller seas at once. A ride along the coast of Australia, with a sailless sea on the right, and a houseless land to the left, is something which, once seen, is never to be forgotten.

I was glad of the ceaseless thunder of the surf, for it prevented us talking; but, when our way was barred by a cape, and we had to turn inland to pass it, we talked none the more. I do not know when I first began to despair; but I

know that I hardly spoke to or looked at Erne the whole of that weary day.

Some time in it, some time in the afternoon, I pushed my horse forward, for I saw a naked man lying asleep in the sun high up on the sand. Asleep, indeed-in the last sleep of all—with his face buried in the sand. When I raised his head, I remember, I saw the mark of his face taken off in the moist sand below, as perfectly as could have been done by an artist. But he was none of the Wainoora's people; for the wreck of a little coasting craft still lay about two hundred yards to sea, saved from utter destruction by the barrier of coral reef over which she had been partly blown. The poor young fellow had stripped and tried to swim ashore, but the rollers had drowned him. Of his shipmates we saw no sign. Their bodies had sunk with their clothes, and had not yet been cast up; but, while we talked in a low voice together over him, there came from the low, shrub-grown sandhills shoreward, a mangy cur, a regular sailor's dog, who yelped round us in the madness of his joy. He had, I suspect, been watching his master, like a true-blue British cur, but had gone into the scrub foraging. Our arrival, he seemed to consider, had put matters on their old footing. It was all right now; he bestrided his master's body and barked aloud with joy. When we rode away, he, conceiving that we were merely going for assistance, followed us to give us advice, but when we had gone a mile he stopped. We whistled and he came again, with his head on one side inquiringly. When we moved on he lost confidence in our intentions, and went scudding back as hard as he could to the corpse. I don't know what became of him, any more than I know what became of the Duc D'Enghien's spaniel who lay in the ditch at Vincennes one memorable morning.

Where was the Wainoora ? No answer from the thundering surf, from the screaming seabirds, from the whis pering woodlands which fringed bay and cape; only an answer in my own

heart, which grew louder and more inexorable as time went on.

We came to the lonely lighthouse, standing on the mainland, behind the bird islands, which lay purple and quiet before us, twenty miles at sea. The lighthouse keepers shook their heads. Not only had they seen nothing of her, but the comrades of the lighthouse in the furthest of the islands seaward had no report to give. They would not say the word, but I saw it in their eyes.

At Palmerston we got intelligence. A ship had made the harbour, by good luck, in the midst of the gale. The captain reported that, nigh a hundred miles to the northward, where, he could not tell, only could guess, he had passed a small screw steamer, with only her foremast standing, steaming in the teeth of it, and seeming to hold her own. The sea was getting up then, he said, and the last he saw of her was, when she was clinging to the side of a great wave, like a bat on a wall.

This was all the account of her we got, and we never, never got any more. From the wild shore, from the wilder sea- -from the coral reef and sandbank, from the storm-tost sailor, or from the lonely shepherd on the forest lands above the cruel sea, no answer but this. She had sailed out of port, and she never made port again. A missing ship, with the history of her last agony unwritten for ever!

CHAPTER LXXXI.

THE END.

YES; Emma was drowned; whelmed in the depths of the cruel sea-her last work over; the final ministration of all pursued while the ship ceased to leap, and began to settle down; cheering the soul of the wretched woman who was her companion, and for whom she was dying; making, by her own high example, the passage from this world to the next less terrible to her trembling companion.

At least, so we may gain from the tenor of her life of a certainty we shall know

nothing. Not so much as a hen-coop of the Wainoora was ever picked up at sea or on shore. Arkwright and his brave men shall lounge upon the quay no more for ever.

I leave Emma Burton to your judgment; and you will, I think, deal leniently with her. We must say a few words about the other people who have borne us company so far, before we take leave of them.

Erne Hillyar, reserving for himself only a younger brother's share of the fortune, made over the rest to Sir Reuben, in order that the baronetcy might be kept up in a befitting manner; so that Sir Reuben found himself suddenly in a very elevated position, with the means of gratifying every taste.

He developed very soon into a most terrible dandy, placing steadily before him the object of being the best-dressed man in London. He never actually attained it, but he got very near the top of the tree. He was very kindly received in society, and very soon began to get on. As his father once said to him, "I have seen many a dandy made out of such stuff as you." He at first patronised the ring and the river extensively; but, since his marriage with Miss Cockpole, daughter of Sir Pitchcroft Cockpole, he has given this up, and has taken to fox-hunting and pheasant-shooting. He is most universally and most deservedly popular.

He naturally leads one on to Samuel Burton. Samuel lives at Palmerston, and his wealth has very much increased. He does not look a bit older since we first knew him; in fact, he is not what one would call an old man even yet, and has probably many years of life before him. His life has been sufficiently decent, and his wealth sufficiently large, to enable him to enter in some sort into the ordinary society of the little township; which may possibly do him good. Nobody but Sir George ever knew of the jewel robberies; and the stolen money seems to have prospered as far as bringing excellent interest goes. That is all I know about Samuel Burton.

Those two most excellent middle-aged gentlemen, the Hon. Jack Dawson, and

James Burton, are always together at one or the other's house. They go long journeys together on horseback; and mighty pleasant it is, going through a forest at sunset, to see the two square grey heads, jogging on, side by side; and pricking on to receive their kindly salute. They are prospering as they deserve.

The Honourable James Burton, the simple good-humoured ex-blacksmith, who has told so much of this story, was over in England in 1862, as commissioner to the International Exhibition. The other Cooksland Commissioner was the Honourable Joseph Burton, his brother. Mrs. James Burton and Mrs. Joseph Burton were compared by some people as samples of Australian beauty. But, in fact, neither of them was Australian. Mrs. James Burton was a Wiltshire girl, who had once been a servant; and Mrs. Joseph was the widow of Lieutenant North, of the Engineers. Mrs. James was undoubtedly the most beautiful; and many people were very much taken by the extreme repose of her manner; but she could not for a moment compare with Mrs. Joseph in vivacity and powers of conversation. They were, both of them, however, in their different ways, thought very nice.

Mr. Compton is dead, and has left all his money (96,000l., by the way) to Baby, Sir George Hillyar's boy, who has been sent over to England by James Oxton, and is now at Harrow. This leads us to speak of the Dowager Lady Hillyar.

Some folks say that she is not quite so cracked as she was; but some, on the other hand say that she is worse than ever. Que voulez-vous? One thing we know about her which seems worth mentioning.

When she heard of Sir George's death, she secluded herself, and they feared the worst consequences. But, after a short time, her grief grew tranquil; and then they discovered that death had removed the cloud which sin had brought between George and Gerty, and that she loved him with the same passionate devotion as ever. She is much alone now,

and her voice is less gay. Sometimes a solitary shepherd, far in the aisles of the dark forest, will be startled by seeing a figure in black pass slowly across the farther end of some long-drawn glade, and disappear into the boscage once more; and then he will say to himself, "The mad Lady Hillyar." Or the native, crouched by the lake in the crater, waiting for the wildfowl; by the lonely shoreless lake unfolded in the steep treeless downs, will watch with eager curiosity the black figure the only dark thing in the blazing landscape-which slowly crosses a segment of the sunny slope, tops the hill, and is gone. But, whenever her wandering feet bring her home-and where is her home but with James Oxton?-whenever she comes into the room where he sits, his wife will notice that a shade will cross his face, as though he said to himself, "It was I did this."

Erne turned his back on a country which had become hateful to him, and, coming to England, managed to get a commission in the army (he was but just of age), and disappeared into the warcloud in the East.

There is one more figure I should like to see before I close; and part from the reader. Ah! here. Who is this tall woman, standing so steady and so firm on the very summit of this breezy cape? She has dismounted from her horse, and is quite alone; the bridle is over her left arm, and with that hand she has gathered up the loose folds of her riding habit, which fits her magnificent figure so nobly; but with her right hand, with the hand which holds her whip, she is shading her eyes, for she is gazing steadily seaward. Why loiter here, Lesbia Burke, idly dreaming? That happened five years ago, and can the sea give up its dead? Sooner shall one of those purple islands at which you are gazing, break from its moorings and ground in the surges which are thundering three hundred feet below than shall the dead come back. But goodbye, Lesbia Burke; a hundred times good-bye!