“I did catch him,” shouted Jan.  “Lionel’s here.”

Lionel sat down by her, and she woke up pretty fully.

“I am grieved at this news for your sake, Mrs. Verner,” he said in a kind tone, as he took her hand.  “I am sorry for Frederick.”

“Both my boys gone before me, Lionel!” she cried, melting into tears—­“John first; Fred next.  Why did they go out there to die?”

“It is indeed sad for you,” replied Lionel.  “Jan says Fred died of fever.”

“He has died of fever.  Don’t you remember when Sibylla wrote, she said he was ill with fever?  He never got well.  He never got well!  I take it that it must have been a sort of intermittent fever—­pretty well one day, down ill the next—­for he had started for the place where John died—­I forget its name, but you’ll find it written there.  Only a few hours after quitting Melbourne, he grew worse and died.”

“Was he alone?” asked Lionel.

“Captain Cannonby was with him.  They were going together up to—­I forget, I say, the name of the place—­where John died, you know.  It was nine or ten days’ distance from Melbourne, and they had travelled but a day of it.  And I suppose,” added Mrs. Verner, with tears in her eyes, “that he’d be put into the ground like a dog!”

Lionel, on this score, could give no consolation.  He knew not whether the fact might be so, or not.  Jan hoisted himself on to the top of a high bureau, and sat in comfort.

“He’d be buried like a dog,” repeated Mrs. Verner.  “What do they know about parsons and consecrated ground out there?  Cannonby buried him, he says, and then he went back to Melbourne to carry the tidings to Sibylla.”

“Sibylla?  Was Sibylla not with him when he died?” exclaimed Lionel.

“It seems not.  It’s sure not, in fact, by the letters.  You can read them, Lionel.  There’s one from her and one from Captain Cannonby.”

“It’s not likely they’d drag Sibylla up to the diggings,” interposed Jan.

“And yet almost as unlikely that her husband would leave her alone in such a place as Melbourne appears to be,” dissented Lionel.

“She was not left alone,” said Mrs. Verner.  “If you’d read the letters, Lionel, you would see.  She stayed in Melbourne with a family:  friends, I think she says, of Captain Cannonby’s.  She has written for money to be sent out to her by the first ship, that she may pay her passage home again.”

This item of intelligence astonished Lionel more than any other.

“Written for money to be sent out for her passage home!” he reiterated. “Has she no money?”

Mrs. Verner looked at him.  “They accuse me of forgetting things in my sleep, Lionel; but I think you must be growing worse than I am.  Poor Fred told us in his last letter that he had been robbed of his desk, and that it had got his money in it.”

“But I did not suppose it contained all—­that they were reduced so low as for his wife to have no money left for a passage.  What will she do there until some can be got out?”