crushed. She had given all the wealth of her girlish affection to
her husband, and had endowed him with all kinds of chivalrous
attributes, only to find out, as many a woman has done before and
since, that her idol had feet of clay. The sudden shock of the
discovery of his baseness altered the whole of her life, and from
being a bright, trustful girl, she became a cold suspicious woman
who disbelieved in everyone and in everything.

But she was of too restless and ambitious a nature to be content
with an idle life, and although the money she still possessed was
sufficient to support her in comfort, yet she felt that she must do
something, if only to keep her thoughts from dwelling on those
bitter years of married life. The most obvious thing to do in
Ballarat was to go in for gold-mining, and chance having thrown in
her way a mate of her father's, she determined to devote herself to
that, being influenced in her decision by the old digger. This man,
by name Archibald McIntosh, was a shrewd, hard-headed Scotchman, who
had been in Ballarat when the diggings were in the height of their
fame, and who knew all about the lie of the country and where the
richest leads had been in the old days. He told Mrs Villiers that
her father and himself had worked together on a lead then known as
the Devil's Lead, which was one of the richest ever discovered in
the district. It had been found by five men, who had agreed with one
another to keep silent as to the richness of the lead, and were
rapidly making their fortunes when the troubles of the Eureka
stockade intervened, and, in the encounter between the miners and
the military, three of the company working the lead were killed, and
only two men were left who knew the whereabouts of the claim and the
value of it. These were McIntosh and Curtis, who were the original
holders. Mr Curtis, went down to Melbourne, and, as previously