coats in the evenings. This particular evening it was
raining greyly, but they could not sit in the saloon because Ole Fred
and his gang had started a smoking concert, and Marcella and Louis would
have been ejected forcibly.

"You're such a fatuous optimist, Marcella," he said impatiently. "Lord,
I wish I'd never started on this business! Everything's against us--I
knew it would be! We'll give it up. You go off into the back blocks
where you will at least be sure of food and a roof. And I'll go to the
devil in the same old way as quickly as possible."

"Oh, I could shake you!" she cried. "You know quite well I'm not going
to leave you, if we have to live on eleven shillings for the rest of our
lives. It isn't eleven shillings now, either. I gave Jimmy half a crown
to spend at Colombo."

"Fool," he muttered gloomily.

"Who spent fifteen pounds?" she retorted.

"I say, I'm sorry, old girl, but my nerves are a bundle of rags! I've
never had a wife to worry about before--and I can't see how I'm going to
make enough money to make her my wife yet--"

Marcella knew nothing whatever about money. She had a few jewels of her
mother, but it did not occur to her that they were worth money. Louis
had absolutely nothing of value. Guided by past experience his mother
had given him the barest necessities for clothes; his watch and most of
his clothes he had sold before he sailed. What made him so irritable
with Marcella was the knowledge that he could easily get the money by
being drunk. Publicans are proverbially open-handed; most publicans
would have lent him ten pounds to spend in their establishment if he had
thoroughly and courageously drunk and pitched some tale about expecting
money by the English mail. He certainly looked worth ten pounds and his
father's name as a publisher was fairly well known even in the Colonies.
He had frequently "raised" twenty or thirty pounds in this way in New
Zealand. Once or twice he had borrowed a few pounds from a doctor by
telling him a pitiful tale, but most doctors recognized his symptoms and
refused to help him to hurt himself.

Suddenly Marcella gave a little giggle of sheer amusement.

"I don't see much to laugh at," he growled.

"I'm thinking of how worried you were about my dignity as your wife and
afraid I'd disgrace you in hotels by being friendly with the servants,"
she said. "It doesn't look as if we're going to get a tent even."

He read unkindness into her chaffing words a