The interesting Englishman was certainly very attentive to Mrs. Macdougal, and Mrs. Macdougal was certainly very much flattered and disturbed by his attentions.  The gossip that had sprung up, from which the principals, and Lucy, Mr. and Mrs. Cargill, and Macdougal alone were excluded, was, to some extent, founded on fact, and the guests left the house reluctantly, confident that interesting mischief was brewing at Boobyalla.

For all this, Ryder’s attitude towards Marcia in the presence of her guests had been merely a piquant travesty of that of an adorer.  He had offered her gallant homage with a humorous reservation.  Perhaps he had reckoned on a keener sense of humour than the guests were possessed of.  At any rate, they preferred to put a rather serious construction on all they saw.  But Mrs. Macdougal alone had good reason for regarding her lion in a serious light; she alone saw him in his other guise, that of the passionate man whose passions burnt behind a cold face—­pale as if with the pallor of a prison that could never leave it, handsome with a quality of suggestive beauty most certain to appeal to a simple, romantic woman.  Already Walter Ryder had infused a new strain into Marcia Macdougal’s character—­terror, the terror that is akin to love, had endowed her with a womanly gravity.  Though the other guests had been gone a fortnight or more, Ryder still remained at Boobyalla.

Lucy Woodrow was deeply interested in Ryder.  He treated her as a comrade, an equal, and she could not help noticing the difference in his tone toward her and that he had adopted towards the others, nor could she help being flattered by the implied compliment.  She was exempt from his raillery.  All along he inferred that she understood him, and accepted his veneer of jocosity and insincerity at its true value.

‘What a hypocrite you are!’ she said one afternoon, as they rode in the shadow of the range.  The children on their ponies were cantering ahead.

‘I a hypocrite!’ he exclaimed.  ’Why, I have not pretended to a single virtue.’

‘No,’ she continued laughingly, ’you are a hypocrite of the other sort.  You pretend to be cruel, and callous, and careless of all that’s good—­a cynic and a mocker.  But I have found you out:  you are really gentle and kind—­an amiable hypocrite.’

‘Miss Woodrow, you are taking my character away.’

’Pish! the disguise was too thin.  Why, the children have penetrated it.  So has poor Yarra.  They love you!  You are brave—­you rescued Mr. Macdougal from the Bushrangers.  You are generous—­you do not try to make him appear contemptible because of his afflictions, as some of the others have done.  You are gentle—­I see it in your bearing towards the little ones.  You are kind, and Yarra is devoted to you.’

‘And yet I swear there are no wings under my coat.’

’Often, when looking at you, I wonder at your resemblance to Mr Done; and I wonder most when I find you expressing a vein of thought I believed to be peculiar to him.  It makes me think that there is something in common between you, aside from your physical likeness, if only a common wrong, or a common sorrow, that has coloured your characters.’