There wasn’t a breath of air that night. Not a leaf stirred—not a bough moved of all the trees in the forest that we rode through. A ‘possum might chatter or a night-owl cry out, but there wasn’t any other sound, except the ripple of the creek over the stones, that got louder and clearer as we got nearer Rocky Flat. There was nothing like a cloud in the sky even. It wasn’t an over light night, but the stars shone out like so many fireballs, and it was that silent anyone could almost have fancied they heard the people talking in the house we left, though it was miles away.

“I sometimes wonder,” Aileen says, at last, raising up her head,“if I had been a man whether I should have done the same things you and Jim have, or whether I should have lived honestly and worked steadily like George over there. I think I should have done so, I really do; that nothing would have tempted me to take what was not my own—or to—to—do other things. I don’t think it is in my nature somehow.”

“I don’t say as you would, Ailie,” I put in; “but there’s many things to be thought of when you come to reckon what a boy sees, and how he’s brought up in the bush. It’s different with girls—though I’ve known some of them that were no great shakes either, and middling handy among the cleanskins, too.”

“It’s hard to say,” she went on, more as if she was talking to herself than to me; “I feel that, bad example—love of pleasure—strong temptation—evil company—all these are heavy weights to drag down men’s souls to hell. Who knows whether I should have been better than the thousands, the millions, that have fallen, that have taken the broad road that leads to destruction. Oh! how dreadful it seems, to think that when once a man has sinned in some ways in this world there’s no turning back—no hope—no mercy—only long bitter years of prison life—worse than death; or, if any thing can be worse, a felon’s death; a doom dark and terrible, dis honouring to those that die and to those that live. Oh that my prayers may avail—not my prayers only, but my life’s service—my life’s service.”