Page:Hornung - Irralies Bushranger.djvu/135

 her strength failed her, and she leaned heavily against the stable wall.

But her brain was busy all the time, and her heart with that lawless rider over every inch of the well-known ground. Now they were at the horse-paddock gate; now galloping beyond in the teeth of their own wind. And so Irralie forgot for the moment the one injunction she had received, the one promise she had given. When at length she came back to herself, and her own peril involving his, she ran like a deer to the station; and very nearly into the arms of the last man she wanted to meet, who was stepping down from the veranda with his valise under his arm.

"Er—Miss Villiers, I presume?" said he in his well-bred drawl; and a hat was taken off with a little flourish in the dark.

Irralie had instinctively determined to disarm suspicion with civility, and, simultaneously, to delay to the last moment the discovery of the empty stable which would