was against his shoulder, her heart beating with his; she could hear his breath come and go quickly.
"Who knows that the world may end to-night?" he whispered. "Let us be happy, Elsie, for once; for the last and only time."
And holding her so, as they sped along he made many strange confidences. He told her of his wild moods of excitement, during which he was scarcely conscious of anything except the overmastering need of some engrossing action; told her of how he had embarked on his reckless career, of the discovery and planning of their hiding-place, of the extraordinary success which had attended the first of the Moonlight escapades, of the manner in which he had procured his armour, and of how he had first worn it in the desert, of the woman who had followed him in the East, of his curious alliance with Trant, unbroken in harmony till Elsie had come between them, of their joint devotion to the cause of Ireland, of the fund to which their unholy gains were mostly devoted, and the secret society to which they owed their allegiance. "Trant has feathered his nest, and so has Sam Shehan, probably," Blake said; "but I have laid by nothing, Elsie, and so far my hands are free from the spending of ill-gotten gold."
It seemed to Elsie like some wonderful tale of romance. He described the fascination of the double life, the piquancy of dramatic contrast between the outlaw and the lawmaker—Blake, the Colonial Secretary; and Blake, the bushranger. He told her of his gallops through the gorges and the labyrinth of scrub in which he had worked off the fever of his blood, of the mad feats of courage; the fights with the gold escort; the dashes back to their mountain hiding-place and return to decorous existence again. "And oddly enough, Elsie," he said, "I don't regret what I did except for you and for one other thing, which may perhaps seem to you an absurd distinction in morals, that is the robbery of Lady Waveryng's diamonds. I suppose that ethically speaking there is not much difference between robbing a gold escort or a bank or even Peter Duncan, the miser mil-
