“Maurice,” she whispered, “how is it that the sight of that man always makes me sad?”
Her husband frowned, and then, caressing her, bade her forget the man and the place and her fears. “I was wrong to have insisted on your coming,” he said. They stood on the deck of the Sydney-bound vessel the next morning, and watched the “Natural Penitentiary” grow dim in the distance. “You were not strong enough.”
“Dawes,” said John Rex, “you love that girl! Now that you've seen her another man's wife, and have been harnessed like a beast to drag him along the road, while he held her in his arms!—now that you've seen and suffered that, perhaps you'll join us.”
Rufus Dawes made a movement of agonized impatience.
“You'd better. You'll never get out of this place any other way. Come, be a man; join us!”
“No!”
“It is your only chance. Why refuse it? Do you want to live here all your life?”
“I want no sympathy from you or any other. I will not join you.”
Rex shrugged his shoulders and walked away. “If you think to get any good out of that 'inquiry', you are mightily mistaken,” said he, as he went. “Frere has put a stopper upon that, you'll find.” He spoke truly. Nothing more was heard of it, only that, some six months afterwards, Mr. North, when at Parramatta, received an official letter (in which the expenditure of wax and printing and paper was as large as it could be made) which informed him that the “Comptroller-General of the Convict Department had decided that further inquiry concerning the death of the prisoner named in the margin was unnecessary”, and that some gentleman with an utterly illegible signature “had the honour to be his most obedient servant”.