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Rh bushrangers' hiding-place had not been discovered by the police.

Blake held back the branches for her, keeping close and riding with his head turned so as to watch how she got on. It was hard riding. Here and there the track crossed a gulley, and there were rocks strewn among the trees. In some places, where the forest was less dense, the horse trod on slippery stone, made more slippery still by the creepers with which it was partially overgrown. Blake exhorted her to keep the Outlaw up, and mourned the omission of a leading rein. It was now dark, but Jack Nutty's white shirt was like a guiding flag ahead. There was something weird and unnatural in that black forest with its funereal foliage and straight stems and grotesque pendant bunya cones. The stillness was oppressive—only the tramping of their horses' feet and stirring of the dead husks of fallen nuts, no sound of bird or beast except occasionally the distant howl of a dingo, or the near thud of an opossum, or stealthy movement of a wallaby. Elsie felt faint, dazed, and weary, and yet she longed passionately that the journey might never end. She longed for open country, where she might ride by Blake's side and where talk would be possible. She had so much to ask, so much to know. Perhaps this was the last time on which she should ever see him in this world. There seemed to her something tragic, strange, and repressed in his air. When night came he dismounted, and brought a little lantern which he had lighted, and fastened it to the side of her saddle, so that it shed a faint weird light on the bunya trunks and the broken ground.

"We shall soon be out of the scrub," he said. "Are you very tired, Elsie?"

"Yes," she answered, and there was a sob in her voice. "But I don't mind anything if only you are safe and we are together."

He bent passionately down and kissed her foot. "Oh, my love!" he cried, and left her abruptly and remounted.

Tears rained from Elsie's eyes. A sense of utter desolation overpowered her. She let the reins fall loosely. And