back my cape," cried Bertha as she too turned away.

Mary walked wildly home and fled to her room and locked the door. Bertha
did likewise.

Mary let Aunt Emma in after a while, ceased sobbing and allowed herself
to be comforted a little. Next morning she was out milking at the usual
time, but there were dark hollows under her eyes, and her little face
was white and set. After breakfast she rolled the cape up very tight in
a brown-paper parcel, addressed it severely to

MISS BERTHA BUCKOLT,

Eurunderee Creek,

and sent it home by one of the school-children. She wrote to Harry Dale
and told him that she knew all about it (not stating what), but she
forgave him and hoped he'd be happy. She never wanted to see his face
again, and enclosed his portrait.

Harry, who was as true and straight as a bushman could be, puzzled it
out and decided that some one of his old love affairs must have come to
Mary's ears, and wrote demanding an explanation.

She never answered that letter.

ACT III

It was Christmas Day at Rocky Rises. The plum puddings had been made,
as usual, weeks beforehand, and hung in rags to the tie-beams and taken
down and boiled again. Poultry had been killed and plucked and cooked,
and all the toil had been gone through, and every preparation made for
a red-hot dinner on a blazing hot day--and for no other reason than
that our great-grandmothers used to do it in a cold climate at
Christmas-times that came in mid-winter. Merry men hadn't gone forth to
the wood to gather in the mistletoe (if they ever did in England, in the
olden days, instead of sending shivering, wretched vassals in rags to
do it); but Uncle Abel had gone gloomily up the ridge on Christmas Eve,
with an axe on his shoulder (and Tommy unwillingly in tow, scowling and
making faces behind his back), and had cut young pines and dragged them
home and lashed them firmly to the veranda-posts, which was the custom
out there.

There was little goodwill or peace between the three or four farms round
Rocky Rises that Christmas Day, and Uncle Abel had been the cause of
most of the ill-feeling, though they didn't know, and he was least aware
of it of any.

It all came about in this way.

Shortly after last New Year Ryan's bull had broken loose and gone astray
for two days and nights, breaking into neighbours' paddocks and filling
himself with hay and damaging other bulls, and making love by night and
hiding in the scrub all day. On the secon