CHAPTER VIII.

Harry Hardy sought the seclusion of the bush, and there spent a very miserable morning.  He was forced to the conclusion that he had made a fool of himself, and the thought that possibly that girl of Shine’s was now laughing with the rest rankled like a burn and impelled many of the strange oaths that slipped between his clenched teeth.  The more he thought of his escapade the more ridiculous and theatrical it seemed.  It was born of an impulse, and would have been well enough had he carried out his intention; but, oh the ignominy of that retreat from the side of the grey-eyed, low-voiced girl under the gaze of the whole congregation!  It would not bear thinking of, so he thought of it for hours, and swung his whip-lash against the log on which he sat, and quite convinced himself that he was hating Shine’s handsome daughter with all the vehemence the occasion demanded.

In many respects Harry was a very ordinary young man; bush life is a wonderful leveller, and he had known no other.  His father had been a man of education and talent, drawn from a profession in his earlier manhood to the goldfields, who remained a miner and a poor man to the day of his death.  His wife was not able to induce their sons to aspire to anything above the occupations of the class with which they had always associated, so they were miners and stockmen with the rest.  But the young men, even as boys, noticed in their mother a refinement and a clearness of intellect that were not characteristic of the women of Waddy; and out of the love and veneration they bore her grew a sort of family pride—­a respect for their name that was quite a touch of old-worldly conceit in this new land of devil-may-care, and gave them a certain distinction.  It was this that served largely to make the branding of Frank Hardy as a thief a consuming shame to his brother.  Harry thought of it less as a wrong to Frank than as an outrage to his mother.  It was this, too, that made the young man burn to take the Sunday School superintendent by the throat and lash him till he howled himself dumb in his own chapel.

Harry returned to his log in Wilson’s back paddock again in the afternoon to wrestle with his difficulties, and, with the gluttonous rosellas swinging on the gum-boughs above, set himself to reconsider all that he had heard of Frank’s case and all the possibilities that had since occurred to him.  Here Dick Haddon discovered him at about four o’clock.  Dick was leading a select party at the time, with the intention of reconnoitring old Jock Summers’s orchard in view of a possible invasion at an early date; but when he saw Harry in the distance he immediately abandoned the business in hand.  An infamous act of desertion like this would have brought down contempt upon the head of another, and have earned him some measure of personal chastisement; but Dick was a law unto himself.