Page:Hornung - Irralies Bushranger.djvu/50

 equivalent for a few handfuls of yellow dust.

Again, if it was a case of impersonation, what had become of the impersonated? He must be somewhere—then where? Irralie thought of novels that she had read with plots founded upon this idea; at the bottom of most there was a murder; but murder was the one suspicion which did not plague her on the head of the real or  Greville Fullarton.

Yet again: in such a case there would be reasonable precautions on the villain's part; but this villain took none. He showed his weapons, and he came just as he was, in his rough bushman's clothes, and with his candid, impudent, dare-devil smile. And at the conjured portrait the girl smiled too, for could a calculating desperado look like that? But the smile froze; for could a man who looked like that be the real owner, and an Earl's son?

No; there was something sinister and wrong and underhand; moreover, the man