Of all the persons beneath the roof-tree of Murdaro head station house during the first part of that night, Mr. Cummercropper was the only one who was successful in wooing “the gentle sleep,” and it was not till early morning that slumber slid upon the souls of the remainder of the party.
For Claude, his host, and the two fair cousins, “each and severally” have their excited brains full of a reeling panorama, called into action by memory and thought, which it is far beyond the power of slumber to extinguish.
Mr. Wilson Giles’s better feelings are fighting a losing battle with the more selfish promptings of his nature, which are supported by the heavy artillery of his niece’s arguments.
The grateful memory of Dyesart’s kindness in the hour of need; the evident affection and esteem—possibly the herald of a warmer feeling—which his daughter evinces for young Angland; the risky nature of the game that his niece urges him to continue; are all arguments in favour of a laissez faire policy. But on the other side there is the uncomfortable thought of losing the fruits of his life’s labour,—the run that he has purchased with hardships innumerable; with blood, murder, and selfishness. Moreover, Lileth knows too much about his concerns now. Her thumb is turned downwards, and the victim of the scheme must be sacrificed.
Giles groans as he thinks how much he hates his niece. He conceives her to be a true Jew at heart,—remorseless and unswerving in her purposes. And who knows better than he, Giles, what Hebrews are. When his gay, wild-oat sowing youth was beginning to wane, had he not felt the white, unforgiving but smiling fangs of members of the race tearing at his throat? Ah! how well he had retaliated upon the first of them who came within his power. Giles rolls over in his bed as he chuckles a hard, dry gurgle of laughter, as he calls to mind how he had schemed and schemed, and, sacrificing his sister in his revenge, had married her to Lileth’s father, with the successful intention of ruining him. But his wandering thoughts always hark back to the same conclusion,—Lileth must have her way.
Meanwhile, Claude in his room tumbles about restlessly, as he thinks, alternately, of the strange likeness between the dark-eyed lady he had met that evening and the assassin of the arches, and of the fair-haired angel into the heaven of whose presence he had so strangely ascended.
Two o’clock, ante-meridian, strikes the carriage clock in Glory Giles’s bedroom, which adjoins that of Miss Mundella. And ere the deep music of its coil-bell vibrations have faded in waves of dying sweetness into silence, the charming occupant of the apartment is wide awake.
All is silent in the house, and the golden-haired maiden lies deeply thinking within the cosy sanctum of her mosquito-curtained couch. Glory had heard the last part of the conversation between Claude and Lileth. It had, of course, considerably interested her. But it was not till the young lady had entered into the quiet of her own room, that she had thought of there being any connection between the murderous attack upon her admirer in Sydney and the photograph incident of the previous evening.
Glory remembers the promise of secrecy exacted from her by her cousin Lileth,—whom she looks upon more in the light of a step-mother than a girl-companion only a few years older than herself,—and dreadful thoughts begin to shape themselves.
The merry little girlish brain is not given to much labour in the tiresome direction of induction-drawing. But where female interest is highly excited, there arises into being a more active means of interpretation than that employed by the more stolid brain of the male human when solving similar problems. This power—called by men “jumping at a conclusion”—tells Claude’s inamorata hearer that “her hero” is in danger at the hands of her dark-haired relative, now slumbering in the next room.