in the
moment that the knife no longer menaced, but the Hindu was quick; and
again the little dog drew back, rending the air with his barking.
Slowly the man backed off the verandah and along the path to the yard
gate, Puck following every step, loathing with all his fury that unfair
advantage of gleaming steel that kept him from his enemy. The Hindu
backed through the gate, and slammed it in the terrier's face, spitting
a volley of angry words as he went. Mary flung the window open and
called her protector anxiously, lest he should find some means of exit
and leave her alone; and Puck came back a few steps, turning again to
bark at his retreating foe. The tall form in the dusty clothes went
slowly down the track. Mary watched him out of sight. Then she fled to
her own room, locked herself in securely, and went, very properly, into
hysterics.

Meanwhile, at the creek, Norah was nodding sleepily over her book. It
was hot, and naturally a lazy day; everything seemed sleepy, from the
cows lying about under the willows on the banks to the bees droning
overhead. Tait, near her, was snoring gently. Even the water below
seemed to be rippling more lazily than usual; the splash of a leaping
fish made an unusual stir in the stillness. Moreover, her book was not
calculated to keep her awake. It was poetry, and Norah's soul did not
incline naturally to poetry, unless it were one of Gordon's stirring
rhymes, or something equally Australian in character. This was quite
different, but it had been Cecil's Christmas gift, and it had seemed to
Norah that politeness required her to study it.

"It's the rummiest stuff!" said the Bush damsel, hopelessly. She turned
to the cover, a dainty thing of pale blue and gold. "William Morris?
Didn't we have a stockman once called Bill Morris? But I'm pretty
certain he never wrote this. The name's the same, though!" thought
Norah, uncertainly. She turned back, and read anew, painstakingly:

No meat did ever pass my lips
Those days. (Alas! the sunlight slips
From off the gilded parclose dips,
And night comes on apace.)

"Then I'm positive it wasn't our Bill Morris, 'cause I never saw a
stockman who was a vegetarian. But what's a parclose? I'll have to ask
Cecil; but then he'll think me such a duffer not to know, and he'll be
so awfully patronizing. But what on earth does it all mean?"

She closed the book in despair, let her eyelids droop, and nodded a
little, while the book in its blue