After we had our tea we sat outside the verandah, and tried to make the best of it. Jim stayed inside with mother for a good while; she didn’t leave her chair much now, and sat knitting by the hour together. There was a great change come over her lately. She didn’t seem to be afraid of our getting caught as she used to be, nor half as glad or sorry about anything. It seemed like as if she’d made up her mind that everything was as bad as it could be, and past mending. So it was; she was right enough there. The only one who was in real good heart and spirits was Starlight. He’d come round again, and talked and rattled away, and made Aileen and Jim and me laugh, in spite of everything. He said we had all fine times before us now for a year or two, anyway. That was a good long time. After that anything might happen. What it would be he neither knew nor cared. Life was made up of short bits; sometimes it was hard luck; sometimes everything went jolly and well. We’d got our liberty again, our horses, and a place to go to, where all the police in the country would never find us. He was going in for a short life and a merry one. He, for one, was tired of small adventures, and he was determined to make the name of Starlight a little more famous before very long. If Dick and Jim would take his advice—the advice of a desperate, ill-fated outcast, but still staunch to his friends—they would clear out, and leave him to sink or swim alone, or with such associates as he might pick up, whose destination would be no great matter whatever befell them. They could go into hiding for a while—make for Queensland and then go into the Northern Territory. There was new country enough there to hide all the fellows that were “wanted” in New South Wales.

“But why don’t you take your own advice?” said Aileen, looking over at Starlight as he sat there quite careless and comfortable-looking, as if he’d no call to trouble his head about anything. “Isn’t your life worth mending or saving? Why keep on this reckless miserable career, which you yourself expect to end ill?”

“If you ask me, Miss Marston,” he said,“whether my life—what is left of it—is worth saving, I must distinctly answer that it is not. It is like the last coin or two in the gambler’s purse, not worth troubling one’s head about. It must be flung on the board with the rest. It might land a reasonable stake. But as to economising and arranging details that would surely be the greatest folly of all.”