station, a fine, handsome young fellow, called Frank Kelly, with a gay, sunny disposition, and a wonderful flow of humour.  When he found I was so much away, thinking Rosanna was only my mistress, he began to console her, and succeeded so well that one day, on my return from a ride, I found she had fled with him, and had taken the child with her.  She left a letter saying that she had never really cared for me, but had married me for my money—­she would keep our marriage secret, and was going to return to the stage.  I followed my false friend and false wife down to Melbourne, but arrived too late, as they had just left for England.  Disgusted with the manner in which I had been treated, I plunged into a whirl of dissipation, trying to drown the memory of my married life.  My friends, of course, thought that my loss amounted to no more than that of a mistress, and I soon began myself to doubt that I had ever been married, so far away and visionary did my life of the previous year seem.  I continued my fast life for about six months, when suddenly I was arrested upon the brink of destruction by—­an angel.  I say this advisedly, for if ever there was an angel upon earth, it was she who afterwards became my wife.  She was the daughter of a doctor, and it was her influence which drew me back from the dreary path of profligacy and dissipation which I was then leading.  I paid her great attention, and we were, in fact, looked upon as good as engaged; but I knew that I was still linked to that accursed woman, and could not ask her to be my wife.  At this second crisis of my life Fate again intervened, for I received a letter from England, which informed me that Rosanna Moore had been run over in the streets of London, and had died in an hospital.  The writer was a young doctor who had attended her, and I wrote home to him, begging him to send out a certificate of her death, so that I might be sure she was no more.  He did so, and also enclosed an account of the accident, which had appeared in a newspaper.  Then, indeed, I felt that I was free, and closing, as I thought, for ever the darkest page of my life’s history, I began to look forward to the future.  I married again, and my domestic life was a singularly happy one.  As the colony grew greater, with every year I became even more wealthy than I had been, and was looked up to and respected by my fellow-citizens.  When my dear daughter Margaret was born, I felt that my cup of happiness was full, but suddenly I received a disagreeable reminder of the past.  Rosanna’s mother made her appearance one day—­a disreputable-looking creature, smelling of gin, in whom I could not recognise the respectably-dressed woman who used to accompany Rosanna to the theatre.  She had spent long ago all the money I had given her, and had sank lower and lower, until she now lived in a slum off Little Bourke Street.  I made enquiries after the child, and she told me it was dead.  Rosanna had not taken it to England with her, but had left it in her