Slumbering? No! For there is a light in there; and presently the green-baize door, that opens from one bed-chamber to the other, swings noiselessly backwards, and Miss Mundella appears holding a lighted taper in her hands.
She wears her dark morning dress, and, after addressing Glory softly, to ascertain if her cousin is awake, and receiving no answer, she moves silently out of the apartment and down the passage.
An hour afterwards one of the station “boys” rides off with a letter from the shadow of the quiet buildings.
This is the burly Cape York native called Carlo,—the executioner of “Government House,”—and as he has been enjoined, by Miss Mundella herself, to hurry over his appointed task, he is not likely to tarry on the way.
The mysterious rider’s iron-grey steed—one of the famous Satan’s daughters—is pawing the ground as her rider, who has dismounted, is fumbling at the fastenings of the home-paddock gate, which opens on to the unfenced run, when he becomes aware of a white figure approaching him.
The aboriginals are great believers in ghosts, and the black horseman is about to fly in terror, when his marvellous powers of sight—good almost in the darkness as a cat’s—tell him that it is the “little Marmie-lady” (the master’s daughter) that is before him.
“Carlo!” exclaims Glory, in the breathless voice of one who has been running, “do you know who I am?”
“Iss. Mine know um, allite, Missee Gorrie,” replies the “boy.”
“Well, then, tell me where you are going?”
“Oh! mine go look longer bullockie, Marmie. Plenty fellow oberthrees sit down longer Bulla Bulla ’tation.”