She held out her arms and clung round my neck as if I’d been raised from the dead. So I was in a kind of a way. But she didn’t say much, or ask what I was going to do next. Poor soul’ she knew it couldn’t be much good anyway; and that if we were hunted before, we’d be worse hunted now. Those that hadn’t heard of our little game with the Momberah cattle would hear of our getting out of Berrima Gaol, which wasn’t done every day.

We hadn’t a deal of time to spare, because we meant to start off for the Hollow that afternoon, and get there some time in the night, even if it was late. Jim and dad knew the way in almost blindfold.

Once we got there we could sleep for a week if we liked, and take it easy all roads. So father told mother and Aileen straight that we’d come for a good comfortable meal and a rest, and we must be off again.

“Oh, father, can’t Dick and Jim stop for a day?” cries out Aileen. “It does seem so hard when we haven’t seen Dick for such a while: and he shut up too all the time.”

“D’ye want to have us all took the same as last time?” growls father. “Women’s never contented as I can see. For two pins 1 wouldn’t have brought them this way at all. I don’t want to. be making roads from this old crib to the Hollow, only I thought you’d like one look at Dick.”

“We must do what’s best, of course,” said poor Aileen; “but it’s hard—very hard on us. It’s mother I’m thinking of, you know. If you knew how she always wakes up in the night, and calls for Dick, and cries when she wakes up, you’d try to comfort her a bit more, father.”

“Comfort her!” says dad; “why, what can I do? Don’t I tell you if we stay about here we’re shopped as safe as anything ever was?’ Will that comfort her, or you either? We’re safe to-day because I’ve got telegraphs on the outside that the police can’t pass without ringing the bell—in a way of speaking. But you see to-morrow there’ll be more than one lot here, and I want to be clean away before they come.”

“You know best,” says Aileen; “but suppose they come here tomorrow morning at daylight, as they did last time, and bring a black tracker with them, won’t he be able to follow up your track when you go away to-night?”