"I tell you, Miss Sedley, it isn't safe for your father to go on as he does with others as well as with me. I don't want to hurt him. It is bad enough to have one man's death on the mind, to want to have another. But what has happened once unawares might happen a second time. There's some of the old grit left, I sometimes feel; and setting myself aside, there are others who wouldn't care a straw so they could have their revenge."
"I thank you for your warning, Styles," said Helen; "and I will do what I can to make your position—I mean to shield you from trouble of any sort. I did not before know what you have now told me; but as you are feeling now the consequences of rash anger, you surely would not give way again to the same temptation?"
"I don't know why not, Miss Sedley. Life such as mine out here is not so valuable as to be worth keeping. But you speak about my feeling the consequences, you don't know all."
The man's voice faltered here, and the muscles of his face were painfully moved.
"I had a wife—I hadn't been married a year." The poor ticket-of-leave man here broke out into a passionate cry, and hastily turned away.
"Don't speak of it to me, Styles. It only distresses you. Pray to God to give you pardon and strength to bear your sorrow. The Lord Jesus will give you rest and peace. Go to Him."
"Yes, I know, I know," said the man, again facing his monitress; "but I think for all that, the devil would long before now have got the mastery, if it hadn't been for you. Helen Sedley, you are like my Caroline, like what she was; and when I look on you, my heart seems to soften."
"And have you no hope of being restored to her?"
"No hope. She is dead; she died on ship-board the year after our last parting in prison. She was following me out." And the man walked slowly away when he had said this.
It was with experiences such as these that Helen Sedley became familiar in her life in the Australian bush. Let it be borne in mind that I am writing of what is now long past. Australian life, whether in bush or towns and cities, has strangely altered since then. But is it to be wondered that, under such circumstances, a feeling of desolation sometimes made the solitary young woman sad, while the need for constant watchfulness and daily labour, not always of the most feminine kind, made her seem and feel older than her years.