"Yet you don't any longer deny that you have been to Australia?"
"It is useless. I lived there for years."
"And you admit that you knew Alexander quite well out there?"
"Most intimately, in the Riverina, some fifteen or twenty years ago; he was on my station as almost everything a gentleman could be, up to overseer; and by that time he was half a son to me, and half a younger brother."
"But no relation, as a matter of fact?"
"None whatever, but my very familiar friend, as I have already told you."
"Then why in the world," Rachel almost thundered, "could you not tell me so in the beginning?"
"That is a question I have already answered."
"Then I have another. Why so often and so systematically pretend that you never were in Australia at all?"
"That is a question which I implore you not to press!"