“Nan, Nan, my darling! At last—at last!”
Arthur Rowan.
EVE THE FIFTH.
SOME EVIDENCE OF ALFRED CURRAN, NEWS PAPER REPORTER, CONCERNING A PAIR OF TRUE LOVERS.
By MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED.
Christmas Eve! Strange that that letter should have reached me to-day. In medias res was always my journalistic motto. Plunge straight into the heart of your subject, and don’t bore your readers with preliminaries.
I was thinking of Nan when Jem Starr, mail-man, rode up to the bachelors’ quarters this afternoon, and chucked the mail-bag on the veranda at my feet.
He told me to take it to the Big House and give it to the Boss. Took me for a new chum most likely—said, he was in a hurry to yard his horse—said, there was a chance of the river coming down with floods up at the heads, and that it was hot enough for us to be let off a term of purgatory. A queer independent chap is Starr.
Nan and Nick! Nick and Nan! But I was thinking of Nan more than of Nick. Yes, it is strange there should have been in that mail-bag a letter, asking me to tell all I knew of Nan and Nick, and of that Christmas time at Eungella Diggings, when I was sub-editor of The Eungella Star.