of the diamonds. The gardener was found wrapped in an opium sleep and was sufficiently dazed to be impervious to interrogatories. There were one or two suspicious circumstances, however, the pine-apples were uprooted, the hut searched, the gardener put under arrest, and then it turned out that the trail was a false one, and the police were at sea once more.
Blake paid one or two hurried visits to the Luya, on business connected with the sale of the selection, he said, but he did not go near Elsie; Trant was away too—he went across the Border, presumably on the same business, taking Shehan with him. The sale was now given out as a fact, and Trant had announced his probable departure for Europe. Minnie Pryde declared that Elsie was responsible for the sudden sale of the selection, and the reason thereof was that neither of the partners would live there as neighbours to Mrs. Frank Hallett. But this of course was absurd, for there seemed no likelihood of Blake giving up his political life, and he was more likely to be brought into contact with Mrs. Frank Hallett in Leichardt's Town than on the Luya.
CHAPTER XXX.
"A BUSH PICNIC."
But in spite of the chase of Moonlight, in spite of the great Waveryng diamond robbery, which had furnished food for sensational leaders and sensational telegrams, both in England and Australia—what a fertile theme for romance-mongering penny-a-liners and society journalists!—in spite of the tragic complications of poor Elsie's love affairs and Frank Hallett's heart-sickness, and Ina Gage's sympathetic dread of some terrible coming calamity, life on the Luya had to continue its ordinary course. Its ordinary course just now meant the carrying-out of Mrs. James Hallett's scheme of a house-party at Tunimba, modelled on the
