'Have you been dearly loved, Mr. Ryder?' asked an impudent Sydneyside girl of nineteen.
'No, no!' laughed Ryder; 'my opportunities have neglected me terribly!'
Conversation sometimes ran in this vein even at Boobyalla, and when it did Ryder was responsible for much confusion of thought. Conversation in the main dealt with riding-trips, dancing-parties, the stirring incidents of the goldfields, and that prolific subject in all societies and at all times—scandal. Mrs. Macdougal would have been thunderstruck to know that she and her British lion provided the choicest morsels for discussion for some days prior to the breaking up of the party.
The Honourable Walter Ryder had been a great social success; he had introduced an absolutely foreign element into the Bush party. His pose of the cynical, dashing, amiable aristocrat, with a cheerful contempt for all aristocratic pretensions, was admirably sustained. His ready good-fellowship pleased the men; his good looks, his facility in adopting a deep interest in his companion for the moment, and his flow of spirits, delighted the women; and yet it not infrequently happened that his conversation was designed more for his own edification than for the entertainment of his hearers. It seemed to Lucy Woodrow that the man only half concealed a sort of mephistophelian contempt for the people towards whom he still contrived to maintain a semblance of cordiality.
The interesting Englishman was certainly very attentive to Mrs. Macdougal, and Mrs. Macdougal was certainly very much flattered and disturbed by his attentions. The gossip that had sprung up, from which the principals, and Lucy, Mr. and Mrs. Cargill, and Macdougal alone were excluded, was, to some extent, founded on fact, and the guests left the house reluctantly, confident that interesting mischief was brewing at Boobyalla.
For all this, Ryder's attitude towards Marcia in the presence of her guests had been merely a piquant travesty of that of an adorer. He had offered her gallant homage with a humorous reservation. Perhaps he had reckoned on a keener sense of humour than the guests were possessed of. At any rate, they preferred to put a rather serious construction on all they saw. But Mrs. Macdougal alone had good reason for regarding her lion in a serious light; she alone saw him in his other guise, that of the passionate man whose passions burnt behind a cold face—pale as if with the pallor of a prison that could never leave it, handsome with a quality of suggestive beauty most certain to appeal to a simple, romantic woman. Already Walter Ryder had infused a new strain into Marcia Macdougal's character—terror, the terror that is akin to love, had endowed her with a womanly gravity. Though the other guests had been gone a fortnight or more, Ryder still remained at Boobyalla.
Lucy Woodrow was deeply interested in Ryder. He treated her as a comrade, an equal, and she could not help noticing the difference in his tone toward her and that he had adopted towards the others, nor could she help being flattered by the implied compliment. She was exempt from his raillery. All along he inferred that she understood him, and accepted his veneer of jocosity and insincerity at its true value.
'What a hypocrite you are!' she said one afternoon, as they rode in the shadow of the range. The children on their ponies were cantering ahead.
'I a hypocrite!' he exclaimed. 'Why, I have not pretended to a single virtue.'
'No,' she continued laughingly, 'you are a hypocrite of the other sort. You pretend to be cruel, and callous, and careless of all that's good—a cynic and a mocker. But I have found you out: you are really gentle and kind—an amiable hypocrite.'