ved his balance like a spinning top.

The Duchess, seen through a haze, seemed unusually stern tonight; but
with beery pride he produced his little present, the mail-clad
delicacy, the armoured crustacean. But Dicky Freeman, offended by
Dad's sudden departure in the middle of the story, had taken a mean
revenge with the aid of the barman, and, as Dad unfastened the
wrapping, there appeared, not the shellfish in its vermilion armour,
but something smooth and black--an empty beer-bottle! Dad stared and
blinked. A look at the Duchess revealed a face like the Ten
Commandments. The situation was too abject for words; he grinned
vacantly and licked his lips.

The Grimes family lived in the third house in the terrace, counting
from the lamp-post at the corner of Buckland Street, where, running
parallel to Cardigan Street, it tumbles over the hill and is lost to
sight on its way to Botany Road. It was a long, ugly row of two-storey
houses, the model lodging-houses of the crowded suburbs, so much alike
that Dad had forced his way, in a state of intoxication, into every
house in the terrace at one time or another, under the impression that
he lived there.

Ten years ago the Grimes family had come to live in Waterloo, when the
Bank of New Guinea had finally dispensed with Dad's services as manager
at Billabong. His wife had picked on this obscure suburb of working
men to hide her shame, and Dad who could make himself at home on an
ant-hill, had cheerfully acquiesced. He had started in business as a
house-agent, and the family of three lived from hand to mouth on the
profits that escaped the publican. Not that Dad was idle. He was for
ever busy; but it was the busyness of a fly. He would call for the
rent, and spend half the morning fixing a tap for Mrs Brown, instead of
calling in the plumber; he would make a special journey to the other
end of Sydney for Mrs Smith, to prove that he had a nose for bargains.

Mrs Grimes forgot with the greatest ease that her neighbours were made
of the same clay as herself, but she never forgot that she had married
a bank manager, and she never forgave Dad for lowering her pride to the
dust. True, she was only the governess at Nullah Nullah station when
Dad married her, but her cold aristocratic features had given her the
pick of the neighbouring stations, and Dad was reckoned a lucky man
when he carried her off. It was her fine, aquiline features and a
royal condescension in manner