“Guthrie Carey?  Oh, I know Guthrie Carey.  Met him in London last year, just after the Dovedale wreck.  He told me of his narrow escape—­was really going with her on her last voyage, and only prevented at the last moment by the offer of this captaincy from his former owners.  It’s the same man.  Do you know him?”

They all told how much they knew him; and there was great commotion at Five Creeks.  Jim was for driving hot-foot to Redford to warn Mr Pennycuick against disseminating the newspaper through the house too rashly.  Alice and her mother each volunteered to go with him, so as to “break it” with feminine skilfulness to Mary, whose reason might be destroyed by too sudden a gorge of joy, like the stomach of a starved man by clumsy feeding.  But while they anxiously discussed what ought to be done, Frances was doing.  The enterprising young lady slipped away, and with Belle’s help caught and saddled her pony, and was off to Redford as if wolves were at her heels.  No war correspondent on active service ever did a smarter trick to get ahead of other papers.

She burst into the family circle violently.

“Mary—­Mary!  Deb!  Rose! father!  Mr Carey is alive!  He wasn’t drowned!  He wasn’t on the Dovedale—­he was just going; but they wanted him back, and they made him a captain, and he’s here now.  His ship came in last night, and there it is in the paper, and his name; and Mr Mills at Five Creeks saw him himself after the Dovedale was wrecked, and he knows him well, and he’s in Melbourne now, and I expect he’ll be here directly—­perhaps he’s coming up now, this very minute—­”

She was checked by angry exclamations from all persons addressed, except Mary.  She, at the moment bending over a table, cutting out needle-work, straightened herself, and stood stockstill and staring, while first her bricky face went dark purple all over, and then seemed drained in three seconds of every drop of blood.  She heard the words:  ‘Mr Carey is alive,’ and instantly believed them; at the same moment her dream-palace vanished, and she saw the bare ground of her love affair exactly as it was—­as Guthrie himself would see it—­and just how she had deceived herself and others.  Her healthy heart and nervous system could not support her under the impact of such a shock.  She reeled as she stood, spun half round, and fell backwards into Deborah’s arms.

“You little fool!” Deb rated the dismayed child, “to blurt it out like that.  Never mind, father, it’s all right.  She has fainted, but she’ll soon come round.  Go and get a smelling-bottle, somebody.  Tell Keziah to bring a little brandy—­don’t speak to anybody else.  Where’s today’s Argus?”

While Rose was flying for restoratives, and Frances speeding through the house with her great news, Deb and her father exchanged significant glances over Mary’s prostrate form.

“It is more than a year,” said Deb, “and he has not even written to her.”