The man seemed to quiver as he met her gaze, and then slowly straightened himself.  “I have been taught a good deal since then and know what an egotistical fool I was,” he said.  “Still, this loan makes too great a difference to me to be expressed in words.  You can scarcely understand—­I think no woman could—­what it is to feel utterly beaten.”

“Still,” said Alice Deringham, with a little flash in her eyes, “I don’t think you ever quite felt that, and now you will have everything you hoped for again?”

Alton’s fingers closed suddenly as he looked down on the gleaming hair and whiteness of the neck beneath it, for the girl’s face had been turned from him.  “No,” he said slowly.  “I wanted so much, you see.”

“And yet you once seemed to think there was nothing impossible to the man who was resolute enough—­and I fancied you were right,” said the girl.  “Still, the things one used to admire occasionally lose their value.”

She glanced at him a moment, and was afraid to look again.  The man’s face was very grim, but she had seen what was in his eyes, and waited almost breathless, until he stooped and laid his hand upon her shoulder.

“Will you look up and tell me that again?” he said.

Alice Deringham was never quite sure whether she looked up or not, but she felt her cheeks glowing and the man’s hand tighten on her shoulder.  “I—­I can’t,” she said.

Perhaps her voice betrayed her, for Alton had evidently flung restraint to the winds.  “Then,” he said, with the quietness which she knew was most often a mask for his vehemence, “I have something to tell you.”

It cost Alice Deringham an effort she remembered all her life, but she shook off his grasp, and stopped him with a little imperious gesture.  “No,” she said, “you must listen.  Go back to the rail.”

Alton stood a moment irresolute, the veins on his forehead swollen and passion in his eyes.  Then he stretched out his hand with a little laugh, and Miss Deringham knew that unless she used all her strength that tale would never be told.  She rose up, and stood looking at him, very statuesque and cold now in the long trailing dress.  Alton let his hand drop and bent his head.

“I am only a bushman, and I am sorry,” he said.  “Now you will sit down again.”

It was evident that he had put a stern restraint upon himself, but the girl knew that he would listen.

“I have a confession to make,” she said quietly.  “You will remember the sale of Townshead’s ranch, but you do not know I kept back the message Miss Townshead sent you.”

Alton laughed a little.  “Nothing would convince me of it.  The man who should have brought it was not sober.  He told me himself.”

Alice Deringham had not anticipated this, and the man’s unwavering faith in her was worse to bear than his anger would have been.  “Still, the message was plain, and I remembered it,” she said.