Mrs Gildea was too busy in the next two or three weeks to trouble herself unduly over Lady Bridget O'Hara's tragic love-affair.

She had to report on the small holders of property in Leichardt's Land and made a trip for that purpose among the free-selectors in her own old district.

The TWENTY YEARS AFTER letter she wrote about this expedition for THE IMPERIALIST was one of her best, and for that she was greatly indebted to Colin McKeith's commentaries.
Old associations with him had been vividly reawakened by this visit to the home of her youth.

She remembered, as if it had been yesterday, how McKeith, a raw youth of eighteen with a horrible tragedy at the back of his young life, had been picked up by her father and brought to Bungroopim to learn the work of a cattle-station....

hitherto his experience, such as it was, had been with sheep in the, then, unsettled north.