 Part 4, Chapter 3 of Australia-Philips—this LibriVox recording is in the public domain—Australia-Philips by Henry-Handel Richardson, Part 4, Chapter 3. It had struck two before the party began to break up. The first move made, however, the guests left in batches escorting one another to their respective house-doors. The Henry-Ock-Ox buggy had been in waiting for some time, and Mrs. Henry's pretty head was drooping with fatigue before Henry, who was in the vein, could tear himself from the card-table. Manny went to the front gate with them, then stalled with the longs to the corner of the road. He was in no hurry to retrace his steps. The air was balmy after that of the overcrowded rooms, and it was a fabulously beautiful night. The earth lay steeped in moonshine as in the light of a silver sun. Trees and shrubs were patented of their last leaf on the ground before them. What odd mental twist made mortals choose rather to huddle indoors by puny candle-light than to be abroad, leaving themselves in a splendour such as this. Leaning his arms on the top rail of a fence, he looked across the slope at the flat, now hushed and still as the encampment of a sleeping army. Beyond the bush him had palely gray. In his younger years he had been used on a night like this when the moon sailed full and free to take his gun and go posseming. Those two old woody gods, Warren Heep and Bunning-Yong, stood out more imposingly than by day, but the rangers seemed to have retreated. The light lay upon them like a visible burden, flattening their contours, filling up kefts and fissures with a milky haze. Good evening, doctor! Spoken in his very ear the words made him jump. He had been lost in contemplation, and the address had a ghostly suddenness. But it was no ghost that stood beside him, nor indeed was it a night for those presences to be abroad whose element is the dark. Ill-pleased at the intrusion he returned but a stiff nod, then since he could not in decency greet and leave take in a breath, feigned to go on for a minute with his study of the landscape, after which he said, Well, I must be moving, good night to you. So you're off your sleep, too, are you? As often happens the impulse to speak was a joint one. The words collided. Instinctively Marnie shrank into himself. This familiar bracketing of his person within others was distasteful to him. It's the man who had sprung up at his elbow bore a reputation that was none of the best. The owner of a small chemist's shop on the flat he contrived to give offence in some re-ways. He was irreligious, an infidel his neighbours had it, and of a sabbath would scar his premises or hoe potatoes rather than attend church or chapel. Though not a confirmed drunkard he had been seen to stagger in the street and be unable to answer when spoken to. Also the woman with whom he lived was not generally believed to be his lawful wife. Hence the public fought shy of his nostrums, and it was a standing riddle how he managed to avoid putting up his shutters. More nefarious practises, no doubt, said the relentless Vox populi. Seen near at hand he was a tall, haggard-looking fellow of some forty years of age, the muscles on his neck standing out like those of a skinny old horse. Here his gratuitous assumption of a common bond drew a cold, pray what reason have you to think that, from Manny, and without waiting for a reply he again said good night and turned to go. The man accepted the rebuff with a meekness that was painful to see. Thought coming on you like this you were a case like my own, no offence, I'm sure, he said humbly. It was evident he was well used to getting the cold shoulder. Manny stayed his steps. What's the matter with you, he asked, on't you well? There's a remedy to be found for most ills under the sun. Not for mine, the doctor isn't born, or the drug discovered that would cure me. The tone of bragging bitterness grated anew, himself given to the vice of overstatement, Manny had small mercy on it in others. Tutt, tutt, he deprecated. There was a brief silence before the speaker went on more quietly. You're a young man, doctor, I'm an old one. And he looked old as he spoke. Manny saw that he had erred in putting him down as merely elderly, he was old and grey and down at hill, fifty of a day, and his clothes hung loose on his bony frame. You'll excuse me if I say I know better than you. When a man's done, he's done, and that's me. Yes, he grew inflated again in reciting his woes. I'm one of your hopeless cases, just as surely as if I was being eaten up by a cancer or a consumption. To mend me, you doctors would need to start me afresh from the mother-egg. You exaggerate, I'm sure. It's that, known once played out, with by right still a good third of one's life to run. That's what puts the sleep away. In the daylight it's none so hard to keep the black thoughts under. Themselves they're not so daresome, and there's one's pipe and the hava of the young fry. But night's the time. Then they come trampoling along, a whole army of them, carrying banners with letters a dozen feet high, so's you shan't miss remembering what you'd give your soul to forget. And so it'll go on, et cetera, ad lib, till it pleases the old joker who sits grinning up aloft to put his heel down, as you or me would squash a bull-ant or a scorpion. You speak bitterly, Mr. Tangy. Does a night like this not bring you calmer, clearer thoughts? And Marnie waved his arm in a large, loose gesture at the sky. His words passed unheeded. The man he addressed spun round and faced him with a rusty laugh. How could that, he cried, just how could it? Why, in all the years I've been in this godforsaken place, long as I've been here, I've never yet heard my own name properly spoken, you're the first doctor, you shall have the middle. But man alive you surely don't let that worry you, why I have the same thing to put up with every day of my life I smile at it. And Marnie believed what he said, forgetting in the antagonism such spleen aroused in him the annoyance the false stressing of his own name could sometimes cause him. So did I once, said Tangy, and ragged his head, but the day came when it seemed the last straw a bit a mean spite on the part of this salivary country itself. You dislike the colony, it appears, intensely. You like it? The counter-question came tip-for-tap. I can be fair to it, I hope, and appreciate its good sides. As always the mere hint of an injustice made Marnie passionately just. Came here of your own free will, did you, weren't crowded out at home, or bamboozled by a pack of lying tales, Tangy's voice was husky with eagerness. That I won't say either, but it is entirely my own choice that I remain here. Well, I say to you, think twice of it, if you have the chance of getting away, take it, it's no place, this doctor, for the likes of you and me, haven't you never turned and asked yourself what the devil you were doing here? And that reminds me, there was a line we used to have drummed into us at school, it's often come back to me since. Coelum nonanimum mutant, quid transmare current. In our green days we gobbled that off by rote. Then it seemed just one more of the ill-slick phrases the classics are full of. Now I take off my hat to the man who wrote it, he knew what he was talking about by the Lord Ari he did. The Latin had come out tentatively with an odd unused intonation. Marni's retort, how on earth do you know what suits me and what doesn't, died on his lips. He was surprised into silence. There had been nothing in the other speech to show that he was a man of any education, rather the reverse. Meanwhile Tangy went on. I grant you it's an antiquated point of view, but doesn't that go to prove what I've been saying, that you and me are old-fashioned too, out of place here, out of date. The modern sort, the sort that gets on in this country, is a prime man that cut in his coat to suit his cloth. For all that the stoppid-homes, like the writer of that line and other ancients, prayed about the Ethiopian's eye, or the leopard in his spots, they didn't buy their experience dear like we did, didn't guess that if a man don't learn to fit himself in, when he gets set down in a land such as this, he's a goner. Any more and they knew that most of those who are old out here, all of them at any rate who've climbed the ladder, nabbed the plunder, have found no more difficulty in changing their spots, and they have their trousers. Yes, doctor, there's only one breed that flourishes, and you don't need me to tell you which it is. Here they lie, and he nodded to right and left of him, dreaming of their money-bags and their dividends and their profits, and how they'll diddle and swindle one another afresh soon as the sun gets up to-morrow. Harder and nails they are, and sharp as needles. You ask me why I do my walking out in the night-time, it sows to avoid the sight of their mean little eyes and their greedy grasping faces. Money's murmured disclaimer fell on deaf ears, like one who'd been bottled up for months, tangy flowed on. What a life! What a set! What a place to end one's days in! Remember if you can, the yarns that were spun around it for our benefit from twenty thousand safe miles away? It was the land a promise and plenty, top full of gold, strewn over with nuggets that only waited for aunts to pick them up. Lies, lies from beginning to end. I say to you this is the hardest and cruelest country ever created, and a man like me is no more good here than the muck, the parents and stale fish guts and other leavens that knocks about a harbour and washes against the walls. I'll tell you, the only use I'll have been here, doctor, when my end comes, I'll dung some bitter land for him with my moulder and rot, that's all. They'll do better with my sword if they knocked us on the eddy times and boiled us down for our fat and marrow. Not much in that line to be got from your carcass, my friend, thought Marnie with an inward smile. But Tangy had paused merely to draw breath. What I say is, instead a lane snares for us, it ought to be forbid by law to give men of my makeshift room. You know, in the old country, we'd find our little nook and jog along decently to the end of our days. But just the staid, respectable, orderly sort I belong to is neither needed nor wanted here. I fall to think in some times on the fates of the hundreds of honours, steady going lads, who, at one time or another, have chucked up their jobs over there for this. The drink, no doubt, took most. They never knew before that one could sweat as you sweat here. And the rest? Well, just accident or the sun or dysentery, or the bloody toil that goes by the name of work in these parts. You know the list, doctor, better than me. They say the waste a life in a new country can't be helped. Doesn't matter, has to be. But that's cold comfort to the wasted. Now, I say to you there ought to be an act of parliament to prevent young fellows squandering themselves, throwing away their lives as I did mine. For when we're young we're not sane, youth's a fever of the brain. And I was young once, though you might not believe it. I had straight joints and no pouch under my chin, and my full share of windy hopes—a senseless truck, these—to be spilled overboard bit by bit, like on a hundred-mile tramp a new chum finishes by pitching from his swag all the needless rubbish he started with. What's wanted to get on here something quite else. Only palms and costive bowels, more in a dash of the sharper and no sickly squeamishness about knocking out other men and stepping into their shoes. And I was only an ordinary young chap, not overstrong or overshrewd, but honest, honest by God I was. That didn't count—it even stood in my way. For I was too good for this, and too mealy-mouthed for that. And while I stuck considering the fairness of a job, someone who didn't care a damn whether it was fair or not walked in over my head and took it from me. There isn't anything I haven't tried my luck at, and with everything it's been the same—nothing's prospered, the money wouldn't come, or stick if it did. And so here I am, all that's left of me, it isn't much, and by and by a few rank-weeds all spring from it, and old Joey there who's paid to grub around the graves, old Joey or Kersen say, a weedy fellow that, a rotten, weedy, blaggard, and spit on his hands and hoe till the weeds lie bleeding their juices, the last airs of me, the last issue of my loins. Prayed is it never occur to you, you fool, that flowers may spring from you. He had listened to Tangi's diatribe in a white heat of impatience, but when he spoke he struck an easy tone, nor was he in any hesitation how to reply, for that he had played devil's advocate all too often with himself in private—an unlovely country, yes, as Englishman understood beauty, and yet not without a charm of its own, an arduous life certainly, and one full of pitfalls for the weak or the unwary. Yet he believed it was no more impossible to win through here and with clean hands than anywhere else. To generalize as his companion had done was absurd, preposterous too the notion that those of their fellow townsmen who had carried off the prizes owed their success to some superiority in bodily strength or sharp dealing or thickness of skin. With Mr. Tangi's permission he would cite himself as an example. He was neither a very robust man, nor he ventured to say one of any marked ability in the other two directions. Yet he had managed to succeed without in the process sacrificing jot or tittle of his principles, and to-day he held a position that any member of his profession across the seas might envy him. Yes, but till you got there, cried Tangi, hasn't every superfluous bit of you every thought of interest that wasn't essential to the dialy grind been pared off? If, said Marnie Stiffening, if what you mean by that is have I allowed my mind to grow narrow and sluggish, I can honestly answer no. In his heart he denied the charge even more warmly, for as he spoke he saw the great corkslabs on which hundreds of moths and butterflies made dazzling spots of color, saw the sheets of pink and blotting paper between which his collection of native plants lay pressed, the glass case filled with geological specimens, his Bible, the Martins of which round Genesis were black with his handwriting, a pile of books on the new marvel spiritualism, Colenso's Pentateuch, the big black volumes of the Arcana Cholestia, Lock on Miracles, he saw all these things and more. No I'm glad to say I've retained many interests outside my work. Mr. Tangy had taken off his spectacles and was polishing them on a crumpled handkerchief. He seemed about to reply, even made a quick half turn towards Marnie, then thought better of it and went on rubbing. A smile played around his lips. And in conclusion let me say this went on Marnie, not unnetled by his companion's expression. It's sheer folly to talk about what life makes of us. Life is not an active force, it's we who make what we will of life. In order to shape it to the best of our powers, Mr. Tangy, to put our brief span to the best possible use, we must never lose faith in God or our fellow men, never forget that whatever happens there is a sky with stars in it above us. Ah! There's a lot of bunkum talked about life, returned Tangy dryly, and settled his glasses on his nose. And as man gets near the end of it he sees just what bunkum it is. Life's only got one meaning doctor, seen plain, there's only one object in everything we do, and that's to keep a sound roof over our heads and a bite in our mouths, and in those of the Alper's creatures who depend on us. The rest has no more sense or significance than a nigger's amour in on the tam-tam. The lucky ones of this world don't grasp it, but we others do, and after all perhaps it's worth while having gone through it to have got at one bit of the truth, however small. Good night. He turned on his heel, and before his words were called in the air had vanished, leaving Marnie blankly staring. The moonshine still bathed the earth gloriously untroubled by the bitterness of human words and thoughts, but the night seemed to have grown chilly, and Marnie gave an involuntary shiver. Someone walking over my—now what would that specimen have called it?—over the four by eight my remains will one day manure. An odd, abusive, wrong-headed fellow he mused as he made his way home. Who would ever have thought, though, that the queer little chemist had so much in him? A failure? Yes, he was right there, and as unlovely as failures always are at close quarters. But as he laid his hands on the gate he jerked up his head and exclaimed half aloud, God bless my soul! What he wanted was not argument or reason, but a little human sympathy. As usual, however, the flash of intuition came too late. For such a touchy nature I'm certainly extraordinarily obtuse where the feelings of others are concerned, he told himself as he hooked on the latch. Why, Richard, where have you been? came Mary's clear voice, muted so as not to disturb John and Ginny who had retired to rest. Purdy and she sat waiting on the veranda. Were you called out? We've had time to clear everything away. Here, dear, I saved you some sandwiches and a glass of carrot. I'm sure you didn't get any suppy yourself with looking after other people. Long after Mary had fallen asleep he lay awakeful. His foolish blunder in response to Tangy's appeal rankled in his mind. He could not get over his insensitiveness. How he had boasted of his prosperity, his moral nicety, his saving pursuits, he to boast, when all that was asked of him was a kindly, my poor fellow soul, you have indeed fought a hard fight, but there is a God above us who will recompense you at his own time, take the word of one who has also been through the slough of despond. And then just these, these hobbies of his, of which he had made so much. Now that he was alone with himself he saw them in a very different light. Lepidoptera collected years since was still unregistered, plants and stones unclassified, his poor efforts at elucidating the Bible waited to be brought into line with the higher criticism. Holmes' levitations and fire-tests called for investigation, while the leaves of some of the books he had cited had never even been cut. The mere thought of these things was provocative, rest-destroying. To induce drowsiness he went methodically through the list of his acquaintances and sought to arrange them under one or other of Tangy's headings. And over this there came moments when he lapsed into depths, fetched himself up again but with an effort, only to fall back. But he seemed barely to have closed his eyes when the nightbell rang. In an instant he was on his feet in the middle of the room applying force to his sleep-clogged wits. He threw open the sash. Who's there? What is it?" Henry Ock Ock's groom. I was to fetch you to our place at once, Governor. But is Mrs. Henry taken ill? Not as I know of, said the man, dryly, but her and the boss had a bit of a tiff on the way home and madam's excited-like. And am I to pay for their tiffs, muttered Marnie hotly? Hush, Richard, he'll hear you, warned Mary, and sat up. I shall decline to go, Henry's a regular old woman. Mary shook her head. You can't afford to offend the Henry's, and you know he's so hasty he'll call in someone else on the spot and you'd never get back, if only you hadn't stayed out so long, dear, looking at the moon. Good God, Mary, is one never to have a moment to oneself, never a particle of pleasure or relaxation. Why, Richard, expostulated his wife, and even felt a trifle ashamed of his petulance. What would you call to-night, I wonder? On the whole evening, one of pleasure and relaxation. And Marnie, struggling into shirt and trousers, had to admit that he would be hard-put to it to give it another name. End of Part Four, Chapter Three Part Four, Chapter Four of Australia Felix. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Australia Felix by Henry-Handle Richardson. Part Four, Chapter Four Hush, Dolly, mustn't cry and make a noise, Uncle Richard's cross. Mary sat on a hassick and rocked a china-babe with all the appurtenant mother-fuss she had picked up from the tending of her tiny stepsister. The present trotty was a demure little maid of some seven summers who gave the impression of having been rather rudely elongated. Her flaxen hair was stiffly imprisoned behind a round black comb, and her big blue eyes alone remained to her from a lovely infancy. Poor Emma's eyes, said Mary. Immutative as a monkey she went on with a child's perfect knowledge that it is all make-believe, yet with an entire credence in the power of make-believe. Naughty child, will you be quiet? There! You've thrown your counter-pane off now. Under what next you'll do? I declare I'll slap you soon, you make me so cross." Through the surgery window the words floated out. For goodness' sake, don't bother me now with such trifles, Mary. It's not the moment, with a whole string of people waiting in the other room. Well, if only you'll be satisfied with what I do, dear, and not blame me afterwards. Get Purdy to give your hand with Ned's affair, he has time and despair, and wetting his fingertip, Marnie nervously flipped over a dozen pages of the book that lay open before him. Well, if you think I should, said Mary, with a spice of doubt. I do, and now go, wife, and remember to shut the door off to you. Oh, until that woman in the kitchen to stop singing, her false notes drive me crazy. How many are there this morning? Eight. No. Nine, if that's another, replied Mary, with a near to the front door. I'll have to stop, then, and Marnie clapped to the work he had been consulting. Never a minute to keep abreast of the times. But that's a good helpful wife, as Mary stooped to kiss him. Do the best you can, Mavonin, and never mind me. Take me with you, auntie. Trotty sprung up from her stool, overturning babe and cradle. Not to-day, darling, beside why are you here? You know I've forbidden you to be on the front veranda when the patients come, run away to the back and play there. Mary donned hat and shawl, opened her parasol, and went out into the sun. With the years she had developed into a rather stately young woman. She held her head high, and walked with a firm, free step. Her first visit was to the stable to find long gym, or old gym, as they now called him, for he was nearing the sixties. The notice to leave, which he had given the day before, was one of the trifles it fell to her to consider. Personally Mary thought his going would be no great loss. He knew nothing about a garden, yet resented instruction, and it had always been necessary to get outside help in for the horses. If he went they could engage someone who would combine the posts. But Richard had taken Umbridge at the old man's tone, had even been nervously upset over it. It behoved her to find out what the matter was. I want a change, said old Jim, duly, in response to her inquiry, and went on polishing wheel-spokes and making the wheel fly. I've been here too long. And now I've got a bit of brass together, and I'm thinking I'd like to be my own master for a spell. But at your age, Jim, is it wise to throw up a comfortable home just because you've laid a little past? It's enough to keep me. I turned over between four and five hundred last week in pie crusts. Oh, said Mary, taken by surprise, then that's your only reason for wishing to leave? And as he did not reply, but went on swishing, come, Jim, if you've anything on your mind, say it out. The doctor didn't like the way you spoke to him last night. At this the old man straightened his back, took a straw from between his teeth, spat, and said, Well, if you must know, Mrs. Marnie, the doctor's not the boss. It pleases me to be hunder any more. And that's the truth. I'm tired of it, dog-tired. You can slave your head off for him, and he never notices the thing you do, or if he does it's only to find fault. It haunt human, I say, and I'll be danged if I stand it any longer. But people who came to Mary with criticism of Richard got no mercy. You're far too touchy, Jim. You know if anyone does how rushed and busy the doctor is, and you ought to be the first to make allowance for him. After all, he's done for you. You wouldn't be here now if it hadn't been for him. And then to expect him to notice and praise you for every little job you do. But Jim was stubborn. He didn't want to deny anything, but he'd rather go, and this day a week if it suited her. It's really dreadful how upish the lower classes get as soon as they have a little money in their pocket, she said to herself as she walked the shadeless sandy road, that this thought was like a shadow cast by her husband's mind on hers, and was ousted by the more indigenous. But after all, who can blame him, poor old fellow, for wanting to take life easy if he has the chance? She even added, he might have gone off as most of them do without a word. Then her mind reverted to what he had said of Richard, and she pondered the antagonism that had churned through his words. It was not the first time she had run up against this spirit, but as usual she was at a loss to explain it. Why should people of old Jim's class dislike Richard as they did? Find him so hard to get on with. He was invariably considerate of them and treated them very generously with regard to money. And yet, for some reason or other, they felt injured by him, and thought and spoke of him with a kind of churlish resentment. She was not clever enough to find the key to the riddle. It was no such simple explanation as that he felt himself too good for them. That was not the case. He was proud, certainly, but she had never known any one who, under it was true a rather sarcastic manner, was more broadly tolerant of his fellow men. And she wound up her soliloquy with the lame admission. Yes, in spite of all his kindness, I suppose he is queer, decidedly queer. And then she heaved a sigh. What a pity it was when you knew him to be at heart such a dear, good, well-meaning man! A short walk brought her to the four-roomed cottage where Ned lived with wife and children, or had lived till lately. He had been missing from his home now for over a week. On the last occasion of his being in Melbourne with the carrying van he had decamped, leaving the boy who was with him to make the return journey alone. Since then nothing could be heard of him, and his billet in the agency had been snapped up. Also they say, said his wife, with an angry sniff, I don't believe a word of it, Mary, since the railway's come, business gone to the dogs, and they're only too glad to get the chance of sacking another man. Polly looked untidyer than ever. She wore a slattenly wrapper, and her hair was thrust unbrushed into its net. But she suffered no doubt in her own way. She was red-eyed and very hasty-handed with her nest full of babes. Sitting in the cheerless parlour, Ned's dark-eyed eldest on her knee, Mary strove to soothe and encourage. But it has never been much of a home for the poor boy was her private opinion, and she pressed her cheek affectionately against the little black curly head that was a replica of Ned's own. What's going to become of us all the Lord only knows, said Polly, after having had the good cry, the sympathetic presence of her sister-in-law justified. I'm not a brown scent troubled about Ned, only boiling with him. He's off on the booze, sure enough, and he'll turn up again safe and sound like loose fish always do. Wait till I catch him, though, he'll get it odd. We never ought to have come here, she went on drying her eyes. Drut the place, and all that's in it, that's what I say. He did better in this in Castle Main, and I'd par behind me there. But once Richard had sent him that twenty quid he'd no rest till he got away. And I thought, when he was so set on it, maybe it'd have a good effect on him to be near you both. But that was just another shot into the bran. You've been a one, Mary, you've done your level best. But Richard's never treated Ned fair. I don't want to take Ned's part, he's nothing in the world but a pretty face noodle. But Richard treated him as if he was the dirt under his feet, and Ned's felt it. Oh, I know who's doing it was, we were never asked up to the house when you'd company. It wasn't yours, my dear, but we can't all have hyphens to our names and go driving around with kid-gloves on our hands and our noses in the air. Mary felt quite depressed by this fresh attack on her husband, ending herself, however, that Polly was excited and overwrought. She did not speak out the defences that leapt to her tongue. She said staunchly, As you put it, Polly, it does seem as if we haven't acted rightly towards Ned, but it wasn't Richard's doing alone, I've been just as much to blame as he has. She sat on, petting the fractious children and giving kindly assurances. As long as she and Richard had anything themselves, Ned's wife and Ned's children should not want. And as she spoke she slipped a substantial proof of her words into Polly's unproud hand. Besides she believed there was every chance now of Ned soon being restored to them, and she told how they were going that very morning to invoke Mr. Smith's aid. Mr. Smith was in the police, as Polly knew, and had influential friends among the force in Melbourne. By tomorrow there might be good news to bring her. Almost an hour had passed when she rose to leave. Mrs. Ned was so grateful for the visit and the help that out in the narrow little passage she threw her arms around Mary's neck and drew her to her bosom. Holding her thus, after several hearty kisses, she said in a mysterious whisper with her lips close to Mary's ear, "'Arie, love, may I say something to you?' And the permission granted went on, "'That is, give you a bit of an hint, dearie.' "'Why, of course you may, Polly. Sure you won't feel hurt, dear?' "'Quite sure. What is it?' And Mary disengaged herself that she might look the speaker in the face. "'Well, it's just this. You mentioned the name yourself, or I wouldn't have dared. It's young Mr. Smith, Mary. My dear, in future don't you have him quite so much about the house as you do at present? It ain't the thing. People will talk, you know, if you give him a handle.' "'Oh, but Polly!' In a blank voice from Mary. "'Nah, nah, I'm not blaming you, not the least, tiddly wink. But there's no arm in being careful, is there, love, if you don't want your name in people's mouths. I'm that fond of you, Mary. You don't mind me speaking, dearie?' "'No, Polly, I don't. But it's the greatest nonsense. I never heard such a thing,' said Mary, hotly. Why, Purdy's Richard's oldest friend, they were schoolboys together. Maybe they were. But I hear he's mostly up at your place when Richard's out. And you're a young and pretty woman, my dear. It's Richard who ought to think of it, and he's so much older than you. Well, just take the hint, love. It comes best, don't it, from one of the family? But Mary left the house in a sad flurry, and even forgot for a street-length to open her parasol. Her first impulse was to go straight to Richard, but she had not covered half a dozen yards before she saw that this would never do. At the best of times Richard abominated gossip, and the fact of it having in the present case dared to fasten its fangs in someone belonging to him would make him doubly wroth. He might even try to find out who had started the talk and get himself into hot water over it. Or he might want to lay all the blame on his own shoulders, make himself the reproaches Ned's Polly had not spared him. Worse still he would perhaps accuse Purdy of inconsiderateness towards her and fly into a rage with him, and then the two of them would quarrel which would be a thousand pitties. For though he often railed at Purdy, yet that was only Richard's way, he was genuinely fond of him and unbent to him as to nobody else. But these were just so many pretexts put forward to herself by Mary for keeping silence, the real reason laid deeper. Eight years of married life had left her where certain subjects were concerned with all the modesty of her girlhood intact. There were things indelicate things which could not be spoken out even between a husband and wife. For her to have to step before Richard and say, Someone else feels for me in the same way as you, my husband, do, would make her ever after unable frankly to meet his eyes, besides giving the vague cobwebby stuff a body it did not deserve. But yet again this was not the whole truth, she had another more uncomfortable side of it to face, and the flies buzzed unheeded around her head. The astonishment she had shown at her sister-in-law's warning had not been altogether sincere. Far down in her heart Mary found a faint, faint trace of complicity. For months past, she could admit it now, she had not felt easy about Purdy. Something disagreeable, disturbing, had crept into their relations. The jolly brotherly manner she liked so well had deserted him. Besides short-timbered he had grown deadly serious, and not the stupidest woman could fail altogether to see what the matter was. But she had willfully bandaged her eyes, and if now and then some word or look had pierced her guard, and disquired at her in spite of herself, she had left it at an incredulous—oh, but then!—but even if, in that case! She now saw her fervent hope had been that the affair would blow over without coming to anything, proved to be just another passing fancy on the part of the unstable Purdy. How many had she not assisted at? This very summer, for instance, a charming young lady from Sydney had stayed with the Urquets, and as long as her visit lasted they had seen little or nothing of Purdy. Whenever he caught off duty he was at Duranga-Billy. As it happened, however, Mr. Urquette himself had been so assiduous in taking his guest about that Purdy had had small chance of making an impression. And in looking back on the incident, what now rose most clearly before Mary's mind, was the way in which Mrs. Urquette, poor thing she was never able to go anywhere with her husband, either she had a child in arms or another coming, the row of toddlers mounted up in steps, the way in which she had said with her pathetic smile, ah, my dear, will he need some one gayer and stronger than I am for company? Mary's heart had been full of pity at the time for her friend's lot, and it swelled again now at the remembrance. But oh, dear, this was straying from the point. Impatiently she jerked her thoughts back to herself and her own dilemma. What ought she to do? She was not a person who could sit still with folded hands and await events. How would it be if she spoke to Purdy herself, talked seriously to him about his work, tried to persuade him to leave Ballarat? Did he mean to hang on here forever, she would say, never intend to seek promotion? But then again the mere questioning would cause a certain awkwardness, while at the slightest trip or blunder on her part what was unsaid might suddenly find itself said, and the whole thing ceased to be the vague cloudy affair it was at present, and though she would actually rather this happened with regard to Purdy than Richard, yet, yet worried and perplexed unable to see before her the straight plain path she loved, Mary once more sighed from the bottom of her heart. Oh, if only men wouldn't be so foolish! Left to himself, Marnie put away his books, washed his hands, and summoned one by one to his presence the people who waited in the adjoining room. He drew a tooth, dressed a wounded wrist, prescribed for diver's internal disorders, all told a baker's dozen of odd jobs. When the last patient had gone he propped open the door, wiped his forehead, and read the thermometer that hung on the wall. It marked a hundred and two degrees. Dejectedly he drove in fancy along the glaring treeless roads, inches deep in cinnamon-colored dust. How one learned to hate the sun out here! What he wouldn't give for a cool grey-green Irish day, with a wet wind blowing in from the sea, a day such as he had heedlessly squandered hundreds of in his youth! Now it made his mouth water only to think of them. It still wanted ten minutes to ten o'clock, and the buggy had not yet come round. He would lie down and have five minutes' rest before starting. He'd been up most of the night, and on getting home had been kept awake by Nuraljo. When an hour later Mary reached home she was amazed to find Groom and buggy still drawn up in front of the house. Why, Molly, no, what's the matter? Where's the doctor? I'm sure I don't know, Mrs. Marnie. I've hollered to Biddy half a dozen times, but she doesn't take any notice. And the mayor's that restless. There, there, steady old girl, steady now, it's these damn flies. Mary hurried indoors. Why, Biddy? You're in it yourself, said the big Irish woman, who now filled the kitchen billet. Faith, and though you scold me, Mrs. Marnie, I couldn't bring it over me heart to wake him, the poor man sleeping like a saint. Biddy, you ought to know better, cried Mary, peeling off her gloves. It's pale as the daddy is. Rubbish, it's only the reflection of the green blind. Richard, you know what the time is. But the first syllable of his name was enough. Oh, good Lord Mary, I must have dropped off. What the dickens! Come, help me, wife, why on earth didn't those fools wake me? Mary held his driving-coat, fetched hat and gloves, while he flung the necessaries into his bag. Have you much to do this morning? Oh, that postmortem's at twelve, isn't it? Yes, and a consultation with months at eleven. I'll just manage it, and no more, muttered Marnie with an eye on his watch. I can't let the mayor take it easy this morning, yes, a full day, and any ox-ox fidgeting for second opinion thinks his wife's not making enough progress. Well, tutta, sweetheart, don't expect me back to lunch. And taking a short cut across the lawn, he jumped into the buggy, and off they flew. Mary's thoughts were all for him at this moment. How proud we ought to feel, she said to herself, that makes the second time in a week all months is sent for him. But how like Henry Ock Ock, she went on with puckered brow. It's quite insulting after the trouble Richard has put himself to. If Agnes' case puzzles him, I should like to know who will understand it better. I think I'll go and see her myself this afternoon. It can't be her wish to call in a stranger. Not till some time after did she remember her own private embarrassment, and by then the incident had taken its proper place in her mind, had sunk to the level of insignificance to which it belonged. Such a piece of nonsense was her final verdict, as if I could worry Richard with it when he has so many really important things to occupy him. End of Part 4, Chapter 5 Yes, those were palmy days, the rate at which the practice spread astonished even himself. No slack seasons for him now, winter saw him as busy as summer, and his chief grant for complaint was that he was unable to devote the meticulous attention he would have wished to each individual case. It would need the strength of an elephant to do that. But it was impossible not to feel gratified by the many marks of confidence he received, and if his work had but left him some leisure for study and an occasional holiday he would have been content. But in these years he was never able to get his neck out of the yoke, and Mary took her annual jaunts to Melbourne and see breezes alone. In a long talk they had with each other it was agreed that except in an emergency he was to be cherry of entering into fresh engagements. This referred in the first place to confinements of which his book was always full, and secondly to outlying Bush cases, the journey to and from which wasted many a precious hour. And where it would have been in politic to refuse a new and influential patient, some one on his list, a doubtful payer or a valetudinarian, was gently to be let drop. And it was Mary who arranged who this should be. Some umbrage was bound to be given in the process, but with her help it was reduced to a minimum. For Mary knew by heart all the links and ramifications of the houses at which she visited, knew precisely who was related to whom by blood or marriage or business, knew where a fence might with safety be risked and where it would do him harm. She had also a woman's tact in smoothing things over. A born doctor's wife declared Marnie in grateful acknowledgment. For himself he could not keep such fiddling details in his head for two minutes on end. But though he thus succeeded in setting bounds to his activity, he still had a great deal too much to do, and in tired moments or when tick-plagued him thought the soul-way out of the impasse would be to associate some one with him as partner or assistant. And once he was within a nace of doing so, chance throwing what he considered a likely person across his path. In attending a coroner's inquest he made the acquaintance of a member of the profession who was on his way from the ovens late, a coached journey of well over two hundred miles to a place called Wall Waller, a day's ride to the west of Ballarat. And since this was a pleasant-spoken man and intelligent, though with a somewhat down-at-heel look, besides being a stranger to the town, Marnie impulsively took him home to dinner. In the evening they sat and talked. The visitor, whose name was Wakefield, was considerably Marnie's senior. By his own account he had had but a rough time of it for the past couple of years. A good practice which he had worked up in the seaport of Warnambool had come to an untimely end. He did not enter into the reasons for this. I was unfortunate, had a piece of ill luck, was how he referred to it. And knowing how fatally easy was a trip in diagnosis, a slip of the scalpel, Marnie tactfully helped him over the illusion. From Warnambool Wakefield had gone to the extreme north of the colony, but the eighteen months spent there had nearly been his undoing. Marnie had not come in badly, but his wife and family had suffered from the great heat and the scattered nature of the work had worn him to skin and bone. He was now casting about him for a more suitable place. He could not afford to buy a practice, must just creep in where he found a vacancy, and while Waller, where he understood there had never been a resident practitioner, seemed to offer an opening. Marnie felt genuinely sorry for the man, and after he had gone sat and revolved the idea, in the event of while Waller proving unsuitable of taking Wakefield on as his assistant. He went to bed full of the scheme and broached it to Mary before they slept. Mary made big eyes to herself as she listened. Like a wise wife, however, she didn't press her own views that night while the idea bubbled hot in him, for at such times when some new project seemed to promise the millennium he stood opposition badly. But she lay awake telling off the reasons she would put before him in the morning, and in the dark allowed herself a tender tickled little smile at his expense. What a man he is for loading himself up with the wrong sort of people, she reflected, and then afterwards he gets tired of them and impatient with them, as is only natural. At breakfast she came back on the subject herself. In her opinion he ought to think the matter over very carefully. Not another doctor on Ballarat had an assistant, and his patience would be sure to resent the novelty. Those who sent for Dr. Marnie would not thank you to be handed over to goodness knows who. Besides Richard, as things are now the money wouldn't really be enough, would it? And just as we have begun to be a little easy ourselves, I'm afraid you'd miss many comforts you've got used to again, dear, she wound up with a mental glance at the fine linen and smooth service Richard loved. Yes, that was true, admitted Marnie with a sigh, and being this morning in a stale mood he forthwith knocked flat the card-house it had amused him to build. Himself he had only half believed in it, or believed so long as he refrained from going into presacred details. There was work for two and money for one. That was the crux of the matter. Successful as the practice was, it still did not throw off a thousand a year. Bad debts ran into a couple of hundred annually, and their improved style of living, the expenses of house and garden, of horses and vehicles, the men's servants, the open house they had to keep, swallowed every penny of the rest. Saving was actually harder than when his income had been but a third of what it was at present. New obligations beset him. For one thing he had to keep pace with his colleagues, make a show of being just as well to do as they. Retrenching was out of the question. His patients would at once imagine that something was wrong, the practice on the downgrade, his skill deserting him, and take their ailments and their fees elsewhere. No, the more one had, the more one was forced to spend, and the few odd hundreds for which Henry Ockock could yearly be counted on came in very handy. As a rule he laid these by for Mary's benefit, for her visits to Melbourne, her bonnets and gowns. It also let her satisfy the needs of her generous little heart in matters of hospitality. Well, it was perhaps not fair to lay the whole blame of their incessant and lavish entertaining at her door. He himself knew that it would not do for them to lag a foot behind other people. Hence the day on which he would be free to dismiss the subject of money from his mind seemed as far off as ever. He might indulge while schemes of taking assistant or partner, the plain truth was he could not afford even the sum needed to settle on a locum tenants for three months while he recuperated. Another and equally valid reason was that the right man for a locum was far to seek. As time went on he found himself pushed more and more into a single branch of medicine. One-two he had never meant to let grow over his head in this fashion. Fritt was common medical knowledge out here that given the distances and the general lack of conveniences thirty to forty maternity cases per year were as much as a practitioner could with comfort take in hand. His books for the past year stood at over a hundred. The night-work this meant was unbearable, infants showing a perverse disinclination to enter the world except under cover of the dark. His popularity, if such it could be called, with the other sex was something of a mystery to him, for he had not one manner for the bedside and another for daily life. He never sought to ingratiate himself with people or to wedle them, still less would he stoop to bully or intimidate. Was always by preference the advisor rather than the dictator. And men did not greatly care for this arm's length attitude. They wrote him down haughty and indifferent and pinned their faith to a blunter, homely manner. But with women it was otherwise, and these also appreciated the fact that no matter what their rank in life, their age or their looks, he met them with the deference he believed due to their sex. Exceptions there were, of course. Affectation or insincerity angered him. With the zaras of this world he had scant patients, while among the women themselves some few, Ned's wife, for example, felt resentment at his very appearance, his gestures, his tricks of speech. But the majority were his staunch partisans, and it was becoming more and more the custom to engage Dr. Marnie months ahead, thus binding him fast. And though he would sometimes give Mary a fright by vowing that he was going to throw up mid and be done with it, yet her ambition, and what an ambitious wife she was, no one but himself knew, that he should some day become one of the leading specialists on Ballarat, seemed not unlikely of fulfilment, if his health kept good, and if he could possibly hold out. For there still came times when he believed that to turn his back for ever on place and people would make him the happiest of mortals. For a time this idea had left him in peace, now it haunted him again, perhaps because he had at last grasped the unpalatable truth that it would never be his luck to save. If saving were the only key to freedom he would still be there, still chained fast, and though he lived to be a hundred. Certain it was he did not become a better colonist as the years went on. He had learned to hate the famous climate, the dust and drought and brazen skies, the drenching rains and bottomless mud, to rebel against the interminable hours he was doomed to spend in his buggy. By nature he was a recluse, not an outdoor man at all. He was tired, too, of the general rampage, the promiscuous connection and slap-dash familiarity of colonial life, sick to death of the all-absorbing struggle to grow richer than his neighbours. He didn't give a straw for money in itself, only for what it brought him. And what was the good of that if he had no leisure to enjoy it? Or was it the truth that he feared being dragged into the vortex of learning to care, he, too, whether or no his name top subscription lists, whether his entertainments were the most sumptuous his wife, the best-dressed woman, in her set? Perish the thought. He did not disquiet Mary by speaking of these things. Still lest did he try to explain to her another more elusive side of the matter. It was this. Did he dig into himself he saw that his uncongenial surroundings were not alone to blame for his restless state of mind. There was in him a gnawing desire for change as change, a distinct fear of being pinned for too long in the same spot, or to put it another way, a conviction that to live on without change meant to cave, for him at least. Of course it was absurd to yield to feelings of this kind at his age in his position with a wife dependent on him. And so he fought them, even while he indulged them. For this was the year in which, casting the question of expense to the winds, he pulled down and rebuilt his house. It came over him one morning on waking that he could not go on in the old one for another day, so cramped was he, so tortured by its lathe and plaster thinness. He had difficulty in winning Mary over, she was against the outlay, the trouble and confusion involved, and was only reconciled by the more solid comforts and greater conveniences offered her. For the new house was of brick, the first brick house to be built on Ballarat, and, oh, the joy, said Richard, of walls so thick that you couldn't hear through them. Had an extra wide veranda, which might be curtained in for parties and dancers, and a side entrance for patients such as Mary had often sighed for. As a result of the new grand year more and more flocked to his door, the present promised to be a record year even in the annals of the Golden City. The completion of the railway line to Melbourne was the outstanding event. Virtually halving the distance to the metropolis in count of time it brought a host of fresh people, capitalists, regulators, politicians about the town, and money grew perceptibly easier. Letters came more quickly, too. Melbourne newspapers could be handled almost moist from the press. One no longer had the sense of lying shut off from the world behind the wall of a tedious coach journey. And the merry Ballaratians, who had never feared or shrunk from the discomforts of this journey, now travelled constantly up and down, attending the Melbourne race meetings, the Government House balls and lawn parties, bringing back the gossip of Melbourne together with its fashions in dress, music, and social life. Mary in particular profited by the change, for in one of those general posts so frequently played by the colonial cabinet, John Turnham had come out Minister of Railways, and she could have a free pass for the asking. John paid numerous visits to his constituency, but he was now such an important personage that his relatives hardly saw him. As likely as not, he was the guest of the Henry Ock Ock's in their new mansion, or of the mayor of the borough. In the past two years Marnie had only twice exchanged a word with his brother-in-law, and then they met again. In Melbourne at six o'clock one January morning the Honourable John, about to enter a saloon compartment of the Ballarat train, paused with one foot on the step, and disregarding the polite remarks of the stationmaster at his heels, screwed up his prominent black eyes against the sun. At the farther end of the train a tall, thin, fair, whiskered man was peering disconsolidately along a row of crowded carriages. God bless me, isn't that? Why, so it is. And leaving the official standing John walked smartly down the platform. My dear Marnie, this is indeed a surprise. I had no idea you were in town. Why not have let me know you proposed coming, he inquired, as they made their way, the train meanwhile held up on their account towards John's spacious reserved saloon. What he means is why didn't I beg a pass of him, and Marnie, who detested asking favours, they had exaggerated emphasis on his want of knowledge. He had not contemplated the journey until an hour beforehand, then the proposed delegate having been suddenly taken ill, he had been urgently requested to represent the masonic lodge to which he belonged at the installation of a new grandmaster. Ah, so you found it possible to get out of honours for once, said John affably as they took their seats. Yes, by lucky chance I had no case on hand that could not do without me for twenty-four hours, and my engagement book I can leave with perfect confidence to my wife. Mary is no doubt a very capable woman. I noticed that afresh when last she was with us, returned John, and went on to tick off Mary's qualities like a connoisseur appraising the points of a horse. A misfortune that she is not blessed with any family, he added. Marnie stiffened and responded dryly, I'm not sure that I agree with you, with all her energy and spirit, Mary is none too strong. Well, well, these things are in the hands of Providence, we must take what is sent us. And caressing his bare chin John gave a hearty yawn. The words flicked Marnie's memory. John had had an addition to his family that winter in the shape to the disappointment of all concerned of a second daughter. He offered belated congratulations. A regular turnum this time, according to Mary, but I'm sorry to hear Jane has not recovered her strength. Oh, Jane is doing very well, but it has been a real disadvantage that she could not nurse. The infant is, well, perfectly formed, of course, but small, small. You must send them both to Mary to be looked after. The talk then passed to John's son, now a schoolboy in Geelong, and John admitted that the reports he received of the lad continued as unsatisfactory as ever. The young rascal has ability, they tell me, but no application. John propounded various theories to account for the boy having turned out poorly. Chief among which was that he had been left too long in the hands of women. They had overindulged him. Mary no more than the rest, my dear fellow, he hastened to smooth Marnie's rising plumes. It began with his mother in the first place. Yes, poor Emma was weak with the boy, lamentably weak. Here with the disconcerting abruptness he drew to him a blue linen bag that lay on the seat, and loosening its string took out a sheaf of official papers in which he was soon engrossed. He had had enough of Marnie's conversation in the meantime, or so it seemed, had thought of something better to do, and did it. His brother-in-law eyed him as he read. He's a bad collar, been living too high, no doubt. A couple of new books were on the seat by Marnie, but he did not open them. He had a tiring day behind him, and the briefest of nights. Besides attending the masonic ceremony which had lasted into the small hours, he had undertaken to make various purchases, not the least difficult of which was the buying of a present for Mary, all the little phallels that went to finish a lady's baldress. Railway travelling was, too, something of a novelty to him nowadays, and he sat idly watching the landscape unroll and thinking of nothing in particular. The train was running through mile after mile of flat treeless country liberally sprinkled with trapstones and clumps of tussock-grass which at a distance could be mistaken for couch-cheap. Here and there stood a solitary sheoque, most doleful of trees, its craggy pine-needle foliage bleached to grey. From the several little stations along the line, mere three-sided sheds which bore a printed invitation to intending passengers to wave a flag or light a lamp, did they wish to board the train? From these shelters long, bare, red roads, straight as ruled lines, ran back into the heart of the burnt-up faded country. Now and then a moving, ruddy cloud on one of them told of some vehicle crawling its laborious way. When John, his memoranda digested, looked up ready to resume their talk, he found that Marley was fast asleep. And since his first words, loudly uttered, did not drowse him, he took out his case, chose a cigar, beheaded it, and puffed it alight. While he smoked, he studied his insensible relative. Marley was sitting uncomfortably hunched up, his head had fallen forward and to the side, his mouth was open, his gloved hands lay limp on his knee. "'Mmm,' said John to himself as he gazed, and, "'Mmm,' he repeated after an interval, then pulling down his waistcoat and generally giving himself a shake to rights, he reflected that for his own two-and-forty years he was a very well-preserved man indeed. CHAPTER VI Oh, Richard, in my dress's blues, had Marley distractedly, and sitting back on her heels, let her arms fall to her sides. She was on her knees, and before her lay a cardboard box from which she had withdrawn a pink fan, pink satin boots with stockings to match, and a pink head-dress. "'Oh, why, the Dickens, didn't you say so?' burst out the giver. I did, dear, as plainly as I could speak. Never heard a word. "'Because you weren't listening, I told you so at the time. Now what am I to do?' And in her worry over the Contre-Ton, Marley quite forgot to thank her husband for the trouble he had been to on her behalf. Get another gown to go with them. Oh, Richard, how like a man! After all the time and money this one has cost me. No, I couldn't do that. Besides, Agnes Ockock is wearing pink and wouldn't like it. And with a forehead full of wrinkle, she slowly began to replace the articles in their sheaths. Of course, they're very nice," she added, as her fingers touched the delicate textures. They would need to be, considering what I paid for them. I wish now I'd kept my money in my pocket. "'Well, your mistake is hardly my fault, is it, dear?' But Richard had gone off in a mood midway between self-annoyance and the huff. Mary's first thought was to send the articles to Ginny with a request to exchange them for their counterparts in the proper colour. Then she dismissed the idea. Blind slave to her nursery that Ginny was, she would hardly be likely to give the matter her personal supervision. The box would just be returned to the shop and the transfer left to the shop people's discretion. They might even want to charge more. No, another plan now occurred to Mary. Agnes Ockock might not yet have secured the various small extras to go with her baldress, and if not, how nice it would be to make her a present of these. They were finer, in better taste than anything to be had on Ballarat, and she had long owed Agnes some return for her many kindnesses. Herself, she would just make do with the simpler things she could buy in town. And so, without saying anything to Richard, who would probably have objected that Henry Ockock was well able to afford to pay for his own wife's finery, Mary tied up the box and drove to Plevener House on the outer edge of Ewell's swamp. Oh, no, I could never have got myself such beautiful things as these, Mary, and Mrs. Henry let her hands play lovingly with the silk stockings, a pretty face aglow with pleasure. Henry has no understanding, dear, for the et cetera's of a costume. He thinks, if he pays for a dress or a mantel, that that is enough, and when the little bills come in he grumbles at what he calls my extravagance. I sometimes wish, Mary, I'd kept back just a teeny-weeny bit of my own money. Henry would never have missed it, and I should have been able to settle a small bill for myself now and then. But you know how it is at first, love. Our one idea is to hand over all we possess to our Lord and Master. She tried on the satin boots. They were a little long, but she would stuff the toes with wadding. If I'm really not robbing you, Mary! Mary reassured her, and thereupon a visit was paid to the nursery where Mr. Henry's son and heir lay sprawling in his cradle. Afterwards they sat and chatted on the veranda while a basket was being filled with peaches for Mary to take home. Not even the kindly drapery of a morning-rapper could conceal the fact that Agnes was growing stout, quite losing her fine figure. That came of her having given up riding exercise, and all to please Mr. Henry. He did not ride himself and felt nervous, or perhaps a little jealous, when his wife was on horseback. She was still very pretty, of course, though by daylight the fine bloom of her cheeks began to break up into a network of tiny veins, and her fair smooth brow bore no trace of the tragedy she had gone through. The double tragedy! For soon after the master of Dandelion's death in a Melbourne lunatic asylum, the little son of the house had died, not yet fourteen years of age, in an inebriate's home. Far was it for Mary to wish her friend to brood or repine, but to have ceased to remember as utterly as Agnes had done, had something callous about it, and in her own heart Mary devoted a fresh regret to the memory of the poor little stepchild of fate. The bore for which all these silken niceties were destined had been organised to raise funds for a public monument to the two explorers, Burke and Wills, and was to be one of the grandest ever given in Ballarat. His Excellency the Governor would, it was hoped, be present in person. The ladies had taken extraordinary pains with their toilettes, and there had been the usual grumblings at expense on the part of the husbands, though not a man but wished and privately expected his wife to take the shine out of all the rest. Mary had besought Richard to keep that evening free. It was her lot ois to go out to entertainments under someone else's wing, and he had promised to do his utmost. But a burnt child in this respect Mary said she would believe it when she saw it, and the trend of events justified her scepticism. The night arrived. She was on the point of adjusting her wreath of her get-me-nots before her candlelit mirror when the dreaded summons came. Marnie had to change and hurry off without the moment's delay. Then for Purdy he'll see you across, he said, as he banged the front door. But Mary dispatched the gardener at a run with a note to Tillie Ockock, who she knew would make room for her in her double-seated buggy. Grindel got out, and Mary, her bunchy skirts held to her, took his place at the back beside Mrs. Amelia. Tillie sat next to the driver, and talked to them over her shoulder. A great big jolly rattle of a woman who ruled her surroundings autocratically. "'Law, no, we left him counting eggs,' she answered in an inquiry on Mary's part. Paz got a brood of cochin china's at the pride and glory of his art, and he's built himself the neatest little place for him you could meet on a summer's day. You must come over and admire it, my dear. That'll please him no end. It was a condition I made for his going on keeping fouls. They were a perfect nuisance all over the garden and round the kitchen and the back, until it wasn't safe to put your foot down anywhere. Fouls are such messy things. At last I up and said I wouldn't have it any longer. So then he and Tom set to work and built themselves a foul arson and run, and there they spend their days thinking out improvements. Here Tillie gave the driver a cautionary dig with her elbow. She did this and under-pocket chinked ominously. "'Look out now, Davey, what you're doing with us?' "'Yeah, that's splosh, Mary. I always bring a bag of change with me, my dear, so that those who lose shan't have an excuse for not paying up.' Tillie was going to pass her evening as usual at the card table. "'Well, I hope you too will enjoy yourselves. Remember now, Mrs. Grindel, if you please, that you're a married woman, and must behave yourself and not go in for any eye-jinks.' She teased her prim little step-daughter as they dismounted from the conveyance and stood straightening their petticoats at the entrance to the hall. "'You know, Matilda, I do not intend to dance to-night,' said Mrs. Amelia, in her sedate fashion. It was as if she sampled each word before parting with it. "'Oh, I know, bless you, and I know why, too, if only it's not another false alarm. Poor old Pa so liked to have a grandchild he was allowed to carry around. He mustn't go near enries, of course, for fear the kid had swallowed one of his dropped-aches and choked over it, and Tillie threw back her head and laughed. But you must hurry up merely, you know, if you want to oblige him.' "'Really, Tillie,' expostulated Mary, she sometimes does go too far,' she thought to herself, the poor little woman. "'Let us two keep together,' she said as she took Amelia's arm. "'I don't intend to dance much either, as my husband isn't here.' But once inside the gaily decorated hall she found it impossible to keep her word, and on her way to a seat beside Agnes Ockock she was repeatedly stopped, and when she sat down up came first one then another to request the pleasure. She could not go on refusing every body, if she did it would look as if she deliberately set out to be peculiar, a horrible thought to Mary. Besides many of those who made their bow were important influential gentlemen, for Richard's sake she must treat them politely. For his sake again she felt pleased. Sadly or wrongly she put the many attention shown her down to the fact of her being his wife. So she turned and offered apologies to Agnes and Amelia, feeling at the same time thankful that Richard had not Mr. Henry's jealous disposition. There sat Agnes looking as pretty as a picture, and was afraid to dance with any one but her own husband, and he preferred to play at cards. "'I think, dear, you might have ventured to accept the Archdeacon for a quadril,' she whispered behind her fan, as Agnes regretfully declined Mr. Long. But Agnes shook her head. It's better not, Mary. It saves trouble afterwards Henry doesn't care to see it. Perhaps Agnes herself, once a passionate dancer, was growing a little too comfortable, thought Mary, as her own programme wandered from hand to hand. Among the last to arrive was Purdy red with haste and making a great thump with his lame leg as he crossed the floor. "'I'm beastly, late, Polly. What have you got left for me?' "'Why, really, nothing, Purdy. I thought you weren't coming, but you may put your name down here, if you like.' And Mary handed him her programme with her thumb on an empty space. She generally made a point of sitting out a dance with Purdy that he might not feel neglected, and of late she had been especially careful not to let him notice any difference in her treatment of him. But when he gave back the card she found that he had scribbled his initials in all three blank lines. "'Oh, you mustn't do that. I'm saving those for Richard.' "'Ah, dance, I believe, Mrs. Marnie,' said a deep voice as the band struck up the rat quadrills, and swaying this way and that in her flounced blue talit and Mary Rose put her hand within the prophet crook, and went off with the police magistrate, an elderly grey beard, went to walk or beat he totem through the figures of the dance, with the supremely sane unconcern that she displayed towards all the arts. "'What odd behaviour!' murmured Mrs. Henry, following Purdy's retreating form with her eyes. He took no notice of us, whatever. And did you see, Amelia, how he stood and stared after Mary? Quite rudely, I thought. Here Mrs. Grindel was forced to express an opinion of her own, always a trial for the nervous little woman. "'I think it's because dear Mary looks so charming to night-agnus,' she ventured in her mouse-like way, then moved up to make room for Archdeke and Long, who laid himself out to entertain the ladies. It was after midnight when Marnie reached home. He would rather have gone to bed, but having promised Mary to put in an appearance he changed and walked down to the town. The ball was at its height. He skirted the rotating couple seeking Mary. Friends hailed him. Ah, well done, doctor! Still in time for a spin, sir? Have you seen my wife? Indeed, and I have. Mrs. Marnie's the bell of the ball. Pleased to hear it. Where is she now? "'Look here, Marnie, we've had a regular dispute,' cried Willie Urquett, pressing up. He was flushed and decidedly garrulous. Almost came to blow as we did, over whose was the finest pair of shoulders, your wife's or Henry O's. I plumped for Mrs. M, and I believe she topped the pole. By, jove, that blue gown makes them look like—what shall I say, like marble?' Does fortune smile, asked Marnie of Henry Ock Ock, as he passed the card-players. He had cut Urquett short with a nod. So his Excellency didn't turn up after all. Sent a telegraphic communication at the last moment. No, I haven't seen her. But stay there's Matilda wanting to speak to you, I believe." Tilly was making all manner of signs to attract his attention. "'Good evening, doctor. Yes, I've a message. You'll find her in the cloakroom. She's been in there for the last half hour or so. I think she's got the headache or something of that sort, and it's waiting for you to take her home.' "'Oh, thank goodness! There you are, Richard,' cried Mary, as he opened the door of the cloakroom, and she rose from the bench on which she had been sitting with her shawl wrapped around her. I thought you'd never come.' She was pale and looked distressed. "'Why, what's wrong, my dear, feeling faint?' asked Marnie incredulously. If so, you'd better wait for the buggy. It won't be long now. You ordered it for two o'clock.' "'Oh, no, I'm not ill. I'd rather walk,' said Mary breathlessly, only please let us get away and without making a fuss. But what's the matter? I'll tell you as we go. No, these boots won't hurt, and I can walk in them quite well. Fetch your own things, Richard.' Her one wish was to get her husband out of the building. They stepped into the street. It was a hot night, and very dark. In her thin, sudden dancing boots, Mary leaned heavily on Richard's arm, as they turned off the street-pavements onto the unpaved roads. Marnie let the lights of the main street go past, then said, "'And now, Madam Wife, you'll perhaps be good enough to enlight me as to what all this means.' "'Yes, dear, I will,' answered Mary obediently, but her voice trembled, and Marnie was sharp of hearing. Why, Polly, sweetheart, surely nothing serious? Yes, it is. I've had a very unpleasant experience this evening. Richard, very unpleasant indeed. I hardly know how to tell you. I feel so upset. Come, out with it.' In a low voice, with downcast eyes, Mary told her story. All had gone well until about twelve o'clock. She had danced with this partner and that, and thoroughly enjoyed herself. Then came Purdy's turn. She was with Mrs. Long when he claimed her, and she had once suggested that they should sit out the dance on one of the cities placed around the hall, where they could amuse themselves by watching the dancers. But Purdy took no notice. He was strange in his manner from the very beginning, and led her into one of the little rooms that opened off the main body of the hall. And I didn't like to object. We were conspicuous enough as it was. His foot made such a bumping noise, it was worse than ever to-night, I thought. For the same reason, though she had felt uncomfortable at being hidden away in there, she had not cared to refuse to stay. It seemed to make too much of the thing. Besides, she hoped some other couple would join them. But— But, Mary, broke from Marnie, he was blank and bewildered. Purdy, however, had got up after a moment or two and shut the door. And then— Oh, it's no use, Richard, I can't tell you, said poor Mary. I don't know how to get the words over my lips. I think I've never felt so ashamed in all my life. And worn out by the worry and excitement she had gone through, and afraid in advance of what she still had to face, Mary began to cry. Marnie stood still, let her arm drop. Do you mean me to understand, he demanded, as if unable to believe his ears, to understand that Purdy dared to— that he dared to behave to you in any but a— And since Mary was using her pocket handkerchief and could not reply, good God, as the fellow-taker-liver of his senses! Is he mad? Was he drunk? Answer me! What does it all mean? And Mary, still continuing silent, he threw off the hand she had replaced on his arm, and he must walk home alone. I'm going back to get the truth of this. But Mary clung to him. No, no, you must hear the whole story first. Anything rather than let him return to the hall. Yes, at first she thought he really had gone mad. I can't tell you what I felt, Richard, knowing it was Purdy, just Purdy, to see him like that, looking so horrible, and to have to listen to the dreadful things he said. Yes, I'm sure he'd had too much to drink. His breath smelt so. She had tried to pull away her hands, but he had held her, had put his arms around her. At the anger she felt racing through her husband, she tightened her grip, stringing, meanwhile, phrase to phrase with the sole idea of getting him safely indoors. Not until they were shut in the bedroom did she give the most humiliating detail of any. How, while she was still struggling to free herself from Purdy's embrace, the door had opened and Mr. Grindel looked in. He drew back at once, of course, but it was awful, Richard. I turned cold. It seemed to give me more strength, though. I pulled myself away and got out of the room. I don't know how. My breath was falling off, my dress was crumpled. Nothing would have made me go back to the ballroom. I couldn't have faced Amelia's husband. I think I shall never be able to face him again. And Mary's tears flowed anew. Richard was stamping about the room aimlessly moving things from her places. God Almighty! He shall answer to me for this. I'll go back and take a horse whip with me. For my sake don't have a scene with him. It would only make matters worse, she pleaded. But Richard strode up and down, treading heedlessly on the flouncing of her dress. What, and let him believe such behaviour can go unpunished, that whenever it pleases him he can insult my wife, insult my wife, make her the talk of the place, brand her before the whole town as a light woman. Oh, not the whole town, Richard. I shall have to explain to Amelia and Tillie and Agnes, that's all, sub-Mary in parenthesis. Yes, and I ask if it's a dignified or decent thing for you to have to do, to go running around assuring your friends of your virtue, cried Richard furiously. Let me tell you this, my dear, at whatever door you knock you'll be met by disbelief. Fate played you a shabby trick when it allowed just that low cat to put his head in. What you think would be left of any woman's reputation after Grindler's choir had poured it over. No, Mary, you've been rendered impossible, and you'll be made to feel it for the rest of your days. People will point to you as the wife who takes advantage of her husband's absence to throw herself into another man's arms, and to me is the convenient husband who provides the opportunity. And Marnie groaned. In an impetuous flight of fancy he saw his good name smirched, his practice slayed waste. Mary lifted her head at this and wiped her eyes. Oh, you always paint everything so black. People know me. No, I would never, ever do such a thing. Unfortunately we live among human beings, my dear, not in a community of saints. But what does a good woman know of how a slander of this kind clings? But if I have a perfectly clear conscience, Mary's tone was incredulous, even a trifle aggrieved. It spells ruin all the same in a whole like this, if it once gets about. But it shan't. I'll put my pride in my pocket and go to Amelia the first thing in the morning. I'll make it right somehow. But I must say, Richard, in the whole affair, I don't think you feel a bit sorry for me, or at least only for me as your wife. The horridest part of what happened was mine, not yours, and I think you might show a little sympathy. I'm too furious to feel sorry, replied Richard, with gaunt truthfulness, still marching up and down. Well, I do, said Mary with a spice of defiance. In spite of everything, I feel sorry that anyone could so far forget himself as Purdy did to-night. You'll be telling me next you have warmer feelings still for him, burst out Marnie. Sorry for the crazy lunatic who, after all these years, after all I've done for him and the trust I've put in him, suddenly falls to making love to the woman who bears my name. Why, a madhouse is the only place he's fit for. There you're unjust and wrong, too. It—it wasn't as sudden as you think. Purdy has been queer in his behaviour for quite a long time now. What in heaven's name do you mean by that? I mean what I say, said Mary staunchly, though she turned a still deeper red. Oh, you might just as well be angry with yourself for being so blind and stupid. Do you mean to tell me you were aware of something? Marnie stopped short in his perambulations and fixed her open mouthed. I couldn't help it. Not that there was much to know, Richard, and I thought of coming to you about it. Indeed, I did. I tried two more than once, but you were always so busy. I hadn't the heart to worry you, for I knew very well how upset you would be. So it comes to this does it, said Marnie, with biting emphasis. My wife consents to another man paying her illicit intentions behind her husband's back. Oh, no, no, no! But I knew how fond you were of Purdy, and I always hoped it would blow over without— without coming to anything. God, forgive me, cried Marnie passionately. It takes a woman's brain to house such a preposterous idea. Oh, I'm not quite the fool you make me out to be, Richard. I've got some sense in me, but it's always the same. I think of you, and you think of no one but yourself. I only want to despair you, and this is the thanks I get for it. And sitting down on the side of the bed, she wept bitterly. Will you assure me, madam, that until to-night nothing I could have objected to has ever passed between you? No, Richard, I won't. I won't tell you anything else. You get so angry you don't know what you're saying. And if you can't trust me better than that, Purdy said to-night you didn't understand me and never had. Oh, he did, did he. There, we have it. Now I'll know every word this scoundrel has ever said to you, and if I have to drag it from you by force. But Mary set her lips with an obstancy that was something quite new in her. It first amazed Marnie, then made him doubly angry. One word gave another. For the first time in their married lives they quarreled, quarreled hotly. And as always at such times many a covered criticism, a secret disapproval which neither had ever meant to breeze to the other, slipped out and added fuel to the fire. It was appalling to both to find out on how many points they stood at variance. Some half hour later, leaving Mary still on the edge of the bed, still crying, Marnie stalked grimly into the surgery and, taking pen and paper, scrawled without even sitting down to do it. You damned scoundrel, if ever you show your face here again I'll thrash you to within an inch of your life. Then he stepped onto the veranda and crossed the lawn, carrying the letter in his hand. But already his mood was on the turn. It seemed as if in the physical effort of putting the words to paper his rage had spent itself. He was conscious now of a certain limpness both of mind and body. His fit of passion over he felt dulled almost indifferent to what had happened. Now, too, another feeling was taking possession of him, opening up vistas of a desert emptiness that he hardly dared to face. But stay! Was that not a movement in the patch of blackness under the fig tree? Had not something stirred there? He stopped and strained his eyes. No, it was only a bow that swayed in the night air. He went out of the garden to the corner of the road and came back empty-handed. But at the same spot he hesitated and peered. Who's there? He asked sharply, and again, is there any one there? But the silence remained unbroken, and once more he saw that the shifting of a branch had misled him. Mary was moving about the bedroom. He ought to go to her and ask pardon for his violence, but he was not yet come to a stage where he felt equal to a reconciliation. He would rest for a while, let his troubled balance right itself, and so he lay down on the surgery-sofa and drew a rug over him. He closed his eyes but could not sleep, his thoughts raced and flew, his brain hunted clues and connections. He found himself trying to piece things together, to fit them in to recollect, and every now and then some sound outside would make him start up and listen and listen. Was that not a footstep? The step of one who might come feeling his way, denied with regret. There were such things in life as momentary lapses, as ungovernable impulses, as fiery contrition, the anguish of remorse. And yet once more he sat up and listened until his ears rang. Then, not the ghostly footsteps of a delusive hope, but a hard human crunching that made the boards of the veranda shake. Tossing off the opossum rug which had grown unbearably heavy, his frang to his feet was wide awake and at the window, staring sleep-charged into the dawn, before a human hand had found the night-bell, and a distracted voice cried, "'Does a doctor live here? A doctor,' I say." In the garden the leaves on trees and shrubs drooped as under an invisible weight. All the stale smells of the day before persisted, that of the medicaments on the shelves, of the unwetted dust on the roads, the sickly odour of malt from a neighbouring brewery. The blow flies buzzed about the ceiling, on the table under the lamp a dozen or more moths lay singed and dead. Now it was nearing six o'clock, clad in his thinnest driving-coat, Marnie sat and watched the man who had come to fetch him beat his horse to a lather. "'Mercy, have a little mercy on the poor brute,' he said more than once. He had stood out for some time against obeying the summons, which meant at lowest a ten-mile drive. Not if he were offered a hundred pounds down was his first impetuous refusal, for he had not seen the inside of a bed that night. But at this he trapped an odd look in the other's eyes, and suddenly became aware that he was still dressed as for the ball. Besides an equally impetuous answer was flung back at him. He promised no hundred pounds, said the man, hadn't got it to offer. He appealed solely to the doctor's humanity. It was a question of saving a life that of his only son. So here they were. We doctors have no business with troubles of our own, thought Marnie, as he listened to the detailed account of an ugly accident. On the roof of a shed the boy had missed his footing, slipped and fallen some twenty feet, landing astride a piece of quartering. Picking himself up he had managed to crawl home, and at first they thought he would be able to get through the night without medical aid. But towards two o'clock his sufferings had grown unbearable. God only knew if by this time he had not succumbed to them. My good man, one does not die of pain alone. They followed a flat treeless road, the grass on either side of which was burnt to hay. Buggy and harness, the latter eaked out with bits of string in an old boot-place, were coated with the dust of months, and the gaunt long-backed horse shuffled through a reddish flower which accompanied them as a choking cloud. A swarm of small black flies kept pace with the vehicle, settling on nose, eyes, neck and hands of its occupants, crawling over the horse's belly and in and out of its nostrils. The animal made no effort to shake itself free, seemed indifferent to the pests. They were only to be disturbed by the hail of blows which the driver occasionally stood up to deliver. At such moments Marnie, too, started out of the light dose he was continually dropping into. Arrived at their destination, a miserable wooden shanty on a sheep-run at the foot of the rangers, he found his patient tossing on a dirty bed with a small pulse of a hundred and twenty, while the right thigh was darkly bruised and swollen. The symptoms pointed to serious internal injuries. He performed the necessary operation. It was evidently no woman about the place. The coffee the father brought him was thick as mud. On leaving he promised to return next day and to bring someone with him to attend to the lad. For the home journey he got a mount on a young and fidgety mare whom he suspected of not long having worn the saddle. In the beginning he had his hands full with her. Then, however, she ceased her antics and consented to advance at an easy trot. How tired he felt! He would have liked to go to bed and sleep for a week on end. As it was he could not reckon on even an hour's rest. By the time he reached home the usual string of patients would await him, and these disposed of, and a bite of breakfast snatched, out him a set anew on his morning round. He did not feel well either. The coffee seemed to have disagreed with him. He had a slight sense of nausea and was giddy, the road swam before his eyes. Possibly the weather had something to do with it, though a dull and sunless morning it was hot as he had never known it. He took out a stud, letting the ends of his collar fly. Poor little Mary, he thought inconsequentially, he had hurt and frightened her by his violence. He felt ashamed of himself now. By daylight he could see her point of view. Mary was so tactful and resourceful that she might safely be trusted to hush up the affair, to explain away the equivocal position in which she had been found. After all, both of them were known to be decent, God-fearing people, and one had only to look at Mary to see that here was no light woman. Nobody in his senses, not even Grindel, could think evil of that broad transparent brow of those straight, kind Mary eyes. No, this morning his hurt was a purely personal one. That it should just be Purdy who did him this wrong—Purdy, playmate and henchman, ally in how many a boyish enterprise, in the hardships and adventures of later life. My known familiar friend in whom I trusted which did eat of my bread. Never had he turned a deaf ear to Purdy's needs, he had fed him and clothed him, caring for him as for a well-loved brother. Surely few things were harder to bear than a blow in the dark from one who stood thus deeply in your debt, on whose gratitude you would have staked your head. It was, of course, conceivable that he'd been swept off his feet by Mary's vivid young beauty, by overindulgence, by the glamour of the moment. But if a man could not restrain his impulses where the wife of his most intimate friend was concerned. Another thing, as long as Mary had remained an immature slip of a girl, Purdy had not given her a thought. When, however, under her husband's wing she had blossomed out into a lovely womanhood, of which any man might be proud, then she had found favour in his eyes. And the slight this put on Mary's sterling moral qualities on all but her physical charms left the worst taste of any in the mouth. Then, not content with trying to steal her love, Purdy had also sought to poison her mind against him. How that wrangled! For until now he had hugged the belief that Purdy's opinion of him was coloured by affection and respect by the tradition of years. Whereas from what Mary had let fall, he saw that the boy must have been sitting in judgment on him, regarding his peculiarities with an unloving eye, picking his motives to pieces. It was like seeing the child of your loins, of your hopes, your unsleeping care, turn and rend you with blackened gratitude. Yes, everything went to prove Purdy's unworthiness. Only he had not seen it, only he had been blind to the truth. And wrapped in this smug blindness he had given his false friend the run of his home, setting, after the custom of the country, no veto on his eternal presence. Disloyalty was certainly abetted by just the extravagant exaggerated hospitality of colonial life. Never must the doors of your house be shut, all you had you were expected to share with any sundowner of fortune who chanced to stop at your gate. The mare shied with the suddenness that almost unseated him. The next moment she had the bit between her teeth and was galloping down the road. Clomp, clomp, clomp, went her hooves on the baked clay. The dust smothered and stung, and he was holding for all he was worth to rain-span stiff as iron. On they flew, his body hammered the saddle, his breath came sobbingly. But he kept his seat, and a couple of miles further on he was down, soothing the wild-eyed, quivering, sweating beast whose nostrils work like a pair of bellows. There he stood, dancing now back along the road, now up at the sky. His hat had gone flying at the first unexpected plunge. He ought to return and look for it. But he shrank from the additional fatigue, the delay in reaching home, this would mean. The sky was still overcast, he decided to risk it. Notting his handkerchief he spread it cap-wise over his head and got back into the saddle. My own familiar friend. And more than that he could add to David's plaint and say, my only friend. In Purdy the one person he had been intimate with passed out of his life. There was nobody to take the vacant place. He had been far too busy of late years to form new friendships. What was left of him after the day's work was done was but a kind of shell. The work was the meaty contents. As you neared the forties too, it grew ever harder to fit yourself to other people. Your outlook had become too set, your ideas too unfluid. Hence you clung the faster to ties formed in the old golden days, worn though these might be to the thinness of a hair. And then there was one's wife, of course, one's dear good wife. But just her very dearness and goodness served to hold possible intimates at arm's length. The knowledge that you had such a confident that all your thoughts were shared with her struck disastrously at a free exchange of privacies. No, he was alone. He had not so much as a dog now to follow at heel and look up at him with the melancholy eyes of its race. Old Pompey had come at poison and Mary had not wished to have a strange dog in the new house. She did not care for animals, and the main charge of it would have fallen on her. He had no time, no time even for a dog. Better it would assuredly be to have someone to fall back on. It was not good for a man to stand so alone. Did troubles come, they would strike doubly hard because of it. Then was the time to rejoice in a warm human hand-clasp. And moodily pondering the reasons for his solitriness, he was once more inclined to lay a share of the blame on the conditions of the life. The population of the place was still in a state of flux. He and a mere handful of others would soon, he believed, be the oldest residence in Ballarat. People came and went, tried their luck, failed and flitted off again, much as in the early days. What was the use of troubling to become better acquainted with a person, when just as you began really to know him he was up and away? At home in the old country a man as often as not died in the place where he was born, and the slow eventless years spent shoulder to shoulder automatically brought about a kind of intimacy. But this was only a surface reason, there was another that went deeper. He had no talent for friendship and he knew it. Indeed he would even invert the thing and say bluntly that his nature had a twist in it which directly hindered friendship. And this though there came moments when he longed, as your popular mortal never did, for close companionship. Sometimes he felt like a hungry man looking on at a banquet of which no one invited him to partake because he had already given it to be understood that he would decline. But such lapses were few. On nine days out of ten he did not feel the need of either making or receiving confidences. He shrank rather with the peculiar shy dread from personal unbuzzermings. Some imposed in him some wayward, boofal, mocking Irish devil, bidding him hold back, remain cool, dry-eyed, in face of others joys and pains. Hence the break with Purdy was a real calamity. The associations of some five and twenty years were bound up in it, measured by it, one's marriage seemed a thing of yesterday. And even more than the friend he would miss the friendship and all it stood for, the solid base of joint experience, the past of common memories into which one could dip his into a well, this handle of, do you remember, which opened the door to such a wealth of anecdote. From now on the better part of his life would be a closed book to any but himself. There were allusions, jests, without number, homey turns of speech which not a soul but himself would understand. The thought of it made him feel old and empty, affected him like the news of a death. But must it be? Was there no other way out? Slow to take hold, he was a hundred times slower to let go. Before now he had seen himself sticking by a person through misunderstandings in gratitude-deception to the blank wonder of the onlookers. Would he not be ready here, too, to forgive, to forget? But he felt hot, hot to suffocation, and his heart was pounding in uncomfortable fashion. The idea of stripping and plunging into ice-cold water began to make a delicious appeal to him. Nothing surpassed such a plunge after a broken night. But of late he had to be wary of indulging. A bath of this kind, taken when he was overtired, was up to set the accursed ticker going, and then he could pace the floor in agony. And yet, oh, good God, how hot it was! His head ached distractedly, and iron band of pain seemed to encircle it. With a sudden start of alarm he noticed that he had ceased to perspire. Now he came to think of it not even the wild gallop had induced perspiration. Pulling up short he fingered his pulse. It was abnormal even for him and feeble. Was it fancy, or did he really find a difficulty in breathing? He tore off his collar through open the neck of his shirt. He had a sensation as if all the blood in his body was flying to his head. His face must certainly be crimson. He put both hands to this top heavy head to support it, and in a blind fit of vertigo orb had lost his balance in the saddle. The trees spun around the distance when black. For a second still he kept upright, then he flopped to the ground, falling face downwards, his arms huddled under him. The mare, all her spirit gone, stood lamb-like and waited. As he did not stir she turned and sniffed at him curiously. Still he lay prone, and having stretched her tired jaws she raised her head and knotted a whinny, an almost human cry of distress. This too failing in its effect she nosed the ground for a few yards, then set out at a gentle mainshaking trot for home. Found a dark conspicuous heap on the Longbear Road and carted back to town by a passing bullock-wagon, Marni lay once the death-like coma had yielded and tossed in fever and allirium. By piecing his broken utterances together Mary learned all she needed to know about the case he had gone out to attend and his desperate ride home. But it was Purdy's name that was oftenist on his lips, it was Purdy he reviled and implored, and when he sprang up with the idea of calling his false friend to account it was as much as she could do to restrain him. She had the best of advice. Old Doctor Muntz himself came two and three times a day. Mary had always thought him a dear old man, and she felt sureer than ever of it when he stood patting her hand and bidding her keep a good heart, for they would certainly pull her husband through. There aren't so many of his kind here, Mrs. Marni, that we can afford to lose him. But altogether she had never known till now how many and how faithful their friends were. Hardly, for instance, had Richard been carried in, stiff as a log and gray as death, when Good Mrs. Devine was fumbling with the latch of the gate, an old sun-bonnet perched crooked on her head. She had run down just as she was in the midst of shelling peas for dinner. She begged to be allowed to help with the nursing, but Mary felt bound to refuse. She knew how the thought of what he might have said in his delirium would worry Richard when he recovered his senses. Few men laid such weight as he on keeping their private thoughts private. Not to be done Mrs. Devine installed herself in the kitchen to superintend the cooking. Less for the patient into whom at first only liquid nourishment could be injected than to seize your own strengthies kept up, dearie. Tillie swooped down and bore off trotty. Delicate fruits, new-laid eggs, jellies and wines came from Magnazokok, while Amelia Grindel, who had no such dainties to offer, arrived every day at three o'clock to mine the house while Mary slept. Archdeacon Long was also a frequent visitor, bringing not so much spiritual as physical aid. For as the frenzy reached its height and Richard was maddened by the idea that a plot was brewing against his life, a pair of strong arms was needed to hold him down. Over and above this, letters of sympathy flowed in, grateful patients called to ask with tears in their eyes how the doctor did. Virtual strangers stopped the servant in the street with the same query. Mary was sometimes quite overwhelmed by the kindness people showed her. The days that preceded the crisis were days of keenest anxiety, but Mary never allowed her heart to fail her. For if, in the small things of life, she was given to building on a mortal's good sense, how much more could she rely at such a pass on the sense of the one above all others? What she said to herself as she moved tirelessly about the sick-room, damping cloths, filling the ice-bag, in filtering drops of nourishment was, God is good, and these words, far from breathing a pierced resignation, voiced a confidence so bold that it bordered on irreverence. Their real meaning was, Richard has still ever so much work to do in the world, curing sick people and saving their lives. God must know this and cannot now mean to be so foolish as to waste him by letting him die. And her reliance on the Almighty's far-sighted wisdom was justified. Richard weathered the crisis, slowly revived to life and health, and the day came when laying a thin white hand on hers he could whisper, My poor little wife, what a fright I must have given you, and added, I think an illness of some kind was due, overdue with me. When he was well enough to bear the journey they left home for a watering-place on the bay. There, on an open beach facing the heads, Marnie lay with his hat pulled forward to shade his eyes, and with nothing to do but scoop up handfuls of the fine coral sand and let it flow again, like liquid silk through his fingers. From beneath the brim he watched the water churn and froth on the brown reefs, followed the sailing ships which, beginning as mere dots on the horizon, swelled to stately white water-birds, and shriveled again to dots, drank in with greedy nostrils the mixed spice of warm sea, hot seaweed, and aromatic tea scrub. And his strengths came back as rapidly as usual. He soon felt well enough leaning on Mary's arm to stroll up and down the sandy roads of the township, to open book and newspaper, and finally to descend the cliffs for a dip in the transparent turquoise sea. At the end of a month he was at home again, sunburnt and hearty, eager to pick up the threads he had let fall, and soon Mary was able to make the comfortable reflection that everything was going on just as before. In this, however, she was wrong, never in their united lives would things be quite the same again. Outwardly the changes might pass unnoticed, though even here it was true a certain name had now to be avoided with which they had formerly made free. But this was not exactly hard to do, Purdy having promptly disappeared. They heard at second hand that he had at last accepted promotion and gone to Melbourne, and since Mary had suffered no inconvenience from his thoughtless conduct they tacitly agreed to let them at a rest. That was on the surface. Inwardly the differences were more marked. Even in the mental attitude they adopted towards what had happened husband and wife were thoroughly dissimilar. Mary did not refer to it because she thought it would be foolish to reopen so disagreeable a subject. In her own mind, however, she faced it frankly, dating back to it as the night when Purdy had been so odious and Richard so angry. Marnie on the other hand gave the affair a wide berth even in thought. For him it was a kind of Pandora's box, of which, having once caught a glimpse of the contents, he did not again dare to raise the lid. Things might escape from it that would alter his whole life. But he too dated from it in the sense of suddenly becoming aware with a throb of regret that he had left his youth behind him, and such phrases as, when I was young, in my younger days, now fell instinctively from his lips. Nor was this all. Deep down in Mary's soul there slumbered a slight embarrassment, one she could not get the better of. It spread and grew. There was a faint, ever-so-fainted doubt of Richard's wisdom. Archie had long known him to be different in many small and some great ways from those they lived amongst, but hitherto this very oddness of his had seemed to her an outgrowth on the side of superiority, fairer judgment, higher motives. Just as she had always looked up to him as rectitude in person, so she had thought him the embodiment of a fine though somewhat unworldly wisdom. Now her faith in his discernment was shaken. His treatment of her in the night of the ball had shocked, confused her. She was ready to make allowance for him. She had told her story clumsily, and had afterwards been both cross and obstinate, while part of his violence was certainly to be ascribed to his coming breakdown. But this did not cover everything, and the ungenerous spirit in which he had met her frankness, his doubt of her word of her good faith, his utter unreasonable-ness in short, had left a cold patch of astonishment in her, which would not yield. She lit on it at unexpected moments. Meanwhile she groped for an epithet that would fit his behaviour. Beginning with some rather vague and high-flown terms, she gradually came down, until with the sense of having found the right thing at last she fixed on the adjective silly. A word which for the rest was in common use with Mary, had she to describe anything that struck her as queer or extravagant. And sitting over her fancy work, into which, being what Richard called safe is the grave, she sowed more thoughts than most women, sitting thus she would say to herself with a half-smile and an incredulous shake of the head. So silly! But hers was one of those inconvenient natures which trust blindly or not at all. Once worked on by a doubt or a suspicion they are never able to shake themselves free of it again. As time went on she suffered strange uncertainties where some of Richard's decisions were concerned. In his good intentions she retained an implicit belief, but she was not always satisfied that he acted in the wisest way. Occasionally it struck her that he did not see as clearly as she did, at other times that he let a passing whim run away with him and overwrite his common sense. And her eyes thus opened, it was not in Mary to stand dumbly by and watch him make what she held to be mistakes. Openly into interfere, however, would also have gone against the grain in her. She had bowed for too long to his greater age in experience. So seeing no other way out she fell back on indirect methods, to her regret, for in watching other women manage their husbands she had felt proud to think that nothing of this kind was necessary between Richard and her. Now she too began to lay little schemes by which, without his being aware of it, she might influence his judgment, divert or modify his plans. Her enforced use of such tactics did not lessen the admiring affection she bore him, that was framed to withstand harder tests. Indeed she was even aware of an added tenderness towards him, now she saw that it behoved her to have forethought for them both. But into the wife's love for her husband there crept something of a mother's love for her child, for a wayward and impulsive yet gifted creature whose welfare and happiness depended on her alone. And it is open to question whether the mother dormant in Mary did not fall with the kind of hungry joy on this latefound task. The work of her hands done she had known empty hours. That was over now. With quickened faculties all her senses on the alert she watched, guided, hindered, foresaw.