p.

Then Mr. Gillet spoke, outside the doorway, to Meg and Pip, who
seemed dazed, stunned.

"It will be hours before we can get help, and it is five now," he
said. "Pip, there is a doctor staying at Boolagri ten miles along
the road. Fetch him--run all the way. I will go back home--fourteen
miles. Miss Meg, I can't be back all at once. I will bring a buggy;
the bullock-dray is too slow and jolting, even when it comes back.
You must watch by her, give her water if she asks--there is nothing
else you can do."

"She is dying?" Meg said--"dying?"

He thought of all that might happen before he brought help, and dare
not leave her unprepared.

"I think her back is broken," he said, very quietly. "If it is, it
means death."

Pip fled away down the road that led to the doctor's.

Mr. Gillet gave a direction or two, then he looked at Meg.

"Everything depends on you; you must not even think of breaking down,"
he said. "Don't move her, watch all the time."

He moved away towards the lower road.

She sprang after him.

"Will she die while you are away?--no one but me."

Her eyes were wild, terrified.

"God knows!" he said, and turned away.

It was almost more than he could bear to go and leave this little
girl alone to face so terrible a thing. "God help me!" she moaned,
hurrying back, but not looking at the hot, low-hanging sky. "Help
me, God! God, help me, help me!"

CHAPTER XXI

When the Sun Went Down

Such a sunset!

Down at the foot of the grass hill there was a flame-coloured sky,
with purple, soft clouds massed in banks high up where the dying
glory met the paling blue. The belt of trees had grown black, and
stretched sombre, motionless arms against the orange background.
All the wind had died, and the air hung hot and still, freighted
with the strange silence of the bush.

And at the top of the hill, just within the doorway of the little
brown hut, her wide eyes on the wonderful heavens, Judy lay dying.
She was very quiet now, though she had been talking--talking of
all sorts of things. She told them she had no pain at all.

"Only I shall die when they move me," she said.

Meg was sitting in a little heap on the floor beside her. She had
never moved her eyes from the face on the pillow of mackintoshes, she
had never opened her white lips to say one word.

Outside the bullocks stood motionless against the sky--Judy said
they looked like stuffed ones having their portrait t