He rose, and left Deringham sitting by the window.  The moon had swung higher now, and the lake was a blaze of silver, but Deringham scarcely noticed it or the ethereal line of snow.  In place of it he saw a shadowy figure hanging between earth and heaven with tense fingers gripping a little bush, while a river frothed down the black hollow five hundred feet below, and remembered that even in that moment the man who hung there regretted he could not repay somebody who had cheated him.  Then he rose and moved once or twice up and down the room, his fancy still dwelling upon the picture.  If the juniper-twigs had yielded it would have made a great difference to him as well as his daughter.  He sat down again presently and stared at the valley, seeing nothing as he remembered that Alton of Somasco might go back to the ranges again, and then with an effort shook the fancies from him.  They were not wholesome for a man hemmed in by difficulties as he was then.

In the meanwhile his daughter stood with one hand on the verandah balustrade, listening to the song of the river which came sonorously through the shadows of the bush.  She also breathed in the scent of the firs, and found it pleasant, but it was instinctively she did so, for her thoughts were also busy.  Alice Deringham had noticed her father’s fits of abstraction as well as the anxiety in his face, and had no great difficulty in connecting them with the loss of Carnaby.  She was also fond of him, for Deringham had shown only his better side to her, and sensible of a very bitter feeling towards the man who had supplanted him.  In addition to this, she remembered the faint amusement in his eyes when he noticed the glint of a silver coin she held half-covered in her hand, and her pulses throbbed a little faster.  The man had placed her in a ridiculous position, and had he guessed her feelings towards him he would probably not have made his appearance as he did just then.

The boards creaked behind her, and turning partly round she straightened herself with a slow sinuous gracefulness, and stood drawn up to her full height looking at the newcomer.  He stood still a moment with veiled admiration in his eyes, and this was not altogether surprising in one who had dwelt for the most part far remote from civilization in the lonely bush.  Alice Deringham had been considered somewhat of a beauty in London, and it was possible that she knew the pale moonlight and the harmonies of blue and silver she stood out against enhanced the symmetry of her outline.  The man stood watching her with his head bent a trifle, but Miss Deringham evinced a fine indifference.  She had formed a somewhat mistaken estimate of him already.

“I want to tell you that I’m sorry,” he said.

The girl fancied she understood him, and it increased her anger, for the fact that this barbarian of the bush should venture to express pity for her was galling.  Still, she had no intention of admitting it, and regarded him inquiringly with a half-contemptuous indifference which she had found especially effective with presumptuous young men in England.  Somewhat to her astonishment it apparently had no result at all, for Alton returned her gaze gravely and without embarrassment.