"Fred--Fred----" she gasped as she held out her hands and groped in the air.
For a time she lay in his arms, finding a woman's relief in a flood of tears. Not until she grew calm did he speak.
"You must go away to-morrow," he said softly. "Go away and rest where you will not be harassed by all the memories which cling around this place. Promise me you will."
She raised her head and looked him in the face through her tears.
"Fred, you know why I cannot leave. Even now, with all this tragedy over me, with him--lying over there--he whom I suspected and blamed--don't think ill of me; but my heart would have been broken but for you."
He drew her to him again, held her close to him, kissed her upturned lips.
"I will leave too," he whispered. "I will come after. Will you promise now?"
When he returned to the bank, Brennan rode up at a gallop.
"Oh, a terrible thing has happened!" he cried as he came into the office. "Waroona Downs has been burned to the ground in the night and both Mrs. Burke and old Patsy burned to death in their beds. I warned her that one of these days that drunken old man would do some damage, but she wouldn't listen to me. Now there's the place in ruins and ashes. It must have burned out hours ago, for there's not a spark left, only the remains of the two lying charred to cinders."
Coming on top of the other news circulating amongst the townsfolk, the destruction of Waroona Downs, with its two inmates, exhausted the local capacity for wonder.
The whole township followed Eustace from the bank, forgetting their earlier condemnation of him now that his innocence had been declared, and being only anxious to testify their sympathy with the woman who had suffered so much in their midst. They would have turned out _en masse_ and escorted her some miles on her way to the junction when she set out from Waroona for the south, but word was passed round that she wanted to go away in silence, unobserved.
Three months later Harding followed her. There was no staying the township then. He was the last of the active participants in the tragic mystery to leave the place, and it was an open secret he was going to join the one for whom they all felt deeply. So they made up in his send-off for the restraint they had exercised upon themselves when she bade the town a silent farewell.