hild lay, and retiring with a serious shake of the head and a muttered
explanation of his want of knowledge on the subject. Then he was
startled by being suddenly called into the room, where he stood,
strangely abashed and helpless, while the light flickered and went back
to its own world. The mother wailed and sorrowed, and Taylor moped and
wondered, until, between them, the neighbour was severely taxed to keep
things going.

The next night he wandered away from the house to the little railed-in
mound in a corner of the paddock where he had put all that remained of
the stock he did not know how to rear. He stood with his arms resting on
the slim fence and his eyes looking away into the evening's mists,
trying, with the aid of a pipe, to drive away the disquietening effect
the expression in his wife's eyes had upon him, and to understand
something of the emptiness that had somehow come into his life since he
had lain, as tenderly as his rough hands could, the fragile little form
in its simple grave.

As he stood, as nearly dreaming as it was possible for him to be, he
became conscious of the figure of a man running hastily towards him from
the direction of the roadway.

"Mate! For the love of God! Is there any women about?" the man exclaimed
as he came near.

"Women?" Taylor repeated vacantly.

"Yes, women," the man replied. "My missus's been took bad down there by
the dray, and if there ain't----"

"Here! Come on!" Taylor shouted, his own recent experience sharpening
his wits. "Follow me, quick."

A few seconds later and the neighbour was speeding away through the
bush, and Taylor was sitting by his wife's side, ill at ease and silent
as he tried to decide whether it would do any harm to any one if he
re-lit the pipe he had allowed to go out in the excitement of the
moment. His wife, catching something of the message so hastily
delivered, lay still with wide-open eyes and straining ears.

"Bill! I 'eard it cry, I 'eard it cry," she exclaimed suddenly. "There
'tis again, only louder," she added, as she essayed to sit up in bed
just as the neighbour hurried into the room.

"He said she'd gone, poor thing, before I got there; but we must try to
save this," she said, as she placed in the lonely mother's arms the tiny
morsel of humanity.

"_I_ will, _I_ will," the other cried as she clutched at the babe,
clasping it to her breast as she rocked to and fro and crooned over it.

Taylor looked at her vaguely for a