"Is there anything I can do for you first? Are you easy? Do you feel pain?"
"The pain is nothing. No, I want nothing. I have done with wants for this world. Please read."
And so the gentle ministrant soothed and comforted the dying man, pointing his weak and feeble faith to Him who came to seek and to save the lost, and who is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him.
[CHAPTER XIX.]
WHAT HAPPENED AT LOW BEECH FARM.
A WEEK had passed away. Poor Styles was dead, and had been buried in the small enclosed plot which five years before was set apart as the burial-ground of Sedley Station. All were on a level there.
Walter Wilson still remained at the station, and, nothing having been seen or heard of the bushrangers, whose career, it was afterwards found, had been cut short in an unsuccessful raid upon another station, he was thinking of renewing his journey, when a proposal was made to him by his host which altered his intention. And, without lingering unnecessarily over this part of our history, it is sufficient to say that the young man remained to take the oversight of the home and out-stations, and to add to the protection of the lonely inhabitants of the log-house.
Walter had his desire now, so far as being a farmer was concerned; and he turned his previous knowledge to good account. And I hope my readers are sufficiently impressed in his favour by what they already know of him—though he has shown himself to be impetuous, obstinate, and unreasonable—to be pleased to learn that he not only honestly and honourably threw all his energies into the service of his new employer, but gradually lost the first smart of the bitter disappointment which he could not help knowing he had brought upon himself, and in the first flush of which he had abandoned his bright prospects of success in England, and severed himself from his own family by a distance of so many thousands of miles, and by a greater distance still in sympathy.