The others stood under an old white cedar tree that shadowed all round. I looked in, and, by George! my face burned, cold as it was. There was Moran lying back in an arm-chair, with a glass of grog in his hand, takin’ it easy and makin’ himself quite at home. Burke and Daly were sitting in two chairs near the table, looking a long way from comfortable; but they had a couple of bottles of brandy on the table and glasses, and were filling up. So was Moran. They’d had quite as much as was good for them. The eldest Miss Whitman was sitting at the piano, playing away tune after tune, while her eyes were wandering about and her lips trembling, and every now and then she’d flush up all over her face; then she’d turn as white as a sheet, and look as if she’d fall off the stool. The youngest daughter was on her knees by her, on the other side, with her head in her lap. Every now and then I could hear a sob come from her, but stifled-like, as if she tried to choke it back as much as she could.

Burke and Daly had their pistols on the table, among the bottles—though what they wanted ‘em there for I couldn’t see—and Moran had stuck his on the back of the piano. That showed me he was close up drunk, for he was a man as never hardly let go of his revolver.

Mrs. Whitman was sitting crouehed up in a chair behind her daughter, with a stony face, looking as if the end of the world was come. I hardly knew her again. She was a very kind woman, too; many a glass of grog she’d given me at shearing time, and medicine too, once I was sick there with influenza.

But Miss Falkland; I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She was sitting on the sofa against the wall, quite upright, with her hands before her, and her eyes looking half proudly, half miserable, round the room. You couldn’t hardly tell she was frightened except by a kind of twitching of her neck and shoulders. Presently Moran, who was more than half boozed as it was, and kept on drinking, calls out to Miss Whitman to sing a song.

“Come, Miss Polly,” says he,“you can sing away fast enough for your dashed old father and some o’ them swells from Bathurst. By George, you must tune your pipe a bit this time for Dan Moran.”

The poor girl said she couldn’t sing just then, but she’d play as much as he liked.

“Yer’d better sing now,” he drawls out,“unless ye want me to come and make you. I know you girls wants coaxing sometimes.”