'You will find our rivers and some other Australian matters are not to be laughed at,' answered Pollie, with a heightened colour. 'But mother and I are too glad to see you back safe to scold you for anything you might say to-night.'
'Really I feel quite heroic,' he answered, with a smile which was rarely bestowed with so much kindness; 'I suppose people are drowned now and then.'
'I should think so,' said Pollie. 'Do you remember that poor young Clarence, from Amhurst, two or three years ago? He was very anxious to get to the Bindera station, where they were having a party; he was told the creek was dangerous, but would try. His horse got caught in a log or something, and came over with him. He was drowned, and carried into the Bindera house next morning a corpse.'
'Very sad. But men must drop in life's battle now and then. There would be too many of us fellows else "crawling between earth and heaven," as Hamlet says.'
'What a cold-blooded way to talk!' said Pollie; 'but of course you really do not think so. Think of quitting life suddenly with all its pleasures.'
'Pleasures?' replied Mr. Devereux abruptly. 'Yes! I daresay very young persons look at it in that light. After all it's quite a lottery like other games of pitch and toss. Sometimes the backers have it all their own way. Then comes a "fielder's" year, and the first-named are obliterated.'
'Then do you really think life is only another name for a sort of Derby Day on a large scale, or a Grand National?' demanded Pollie, with a shocked expression of countenance—'at the end of which one man is borne in a shining hero, aglow with triumph, while another breaks his neck over the last leap, or loses fame and fortune irrevocably; and that neither can help the appointed lot?'
Her cousin regarded her for a moment with a fixed and searching gaze. Then a ripple of merriment broke over his features, and a rarely seen expression of frank admiration succeeded to the ordinary composure of his visage. 'I don't go quite as far as that.
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will."
But I am afraid few of us live as if we thought so. That ever I should have found myself in Australia was at one time so unlikely, so all but impossible, that I may well believe in the interposition of a Ruler of Events.'