. Otherwise I should come by the train that has brought
this letter. By great luck I ran into an old girl I knew in New Zealand.
She's a nurse who saved my life once when I was in hospital there. She's
a dear--Oh quite old; don't get jealous, my pet! I'm staying the night
at an hotel in Little Collins Street. The landlord has lent me a fiver,
so don't worry about me. One thing I've to tell you--a terrible
confession. I lost your father's ring in my haste the other night, but
never mind. I'll buy you another. I hope your Uncle stumped up.
Australia's a damnable place to be hard up in. Will you tip my stewards
for me and see my things through the Customs? Give Knollys and the other
chap ten shillings each. They haven't killed themselves on my behalf, or
it would have been a quid. Tell them I sent it. I don't want them to
know I'm hard up. If I hit up that railway pass I should be through
before lunch on Saturday. And then, old girl, there'll be doings! I hear
you can get hitched up in Sydney for about twenty-seven bob, without
waiting for notices of any sort. Till then, all my love and all my
thoughts are for you.

"Your own Louis.

"P.S. (Just like a woman) You'd better get something decent and not
Scotch to wear if your uncle came down decently. And book us rooms at
the Hotel Australia. They do you very well there."

It was her first love letter. She felt, vaguely, that it lacked
something though she did not quite know what. She hated the talk about
money and about her uncle. She hated that he could borrow money so
casually from a nurse who had been good to him. She wished that terrible
hunger he had predicted had not happened to her. She knew, with absolute
certainty, that Dr. Angus had gauged her fatal habit of conceited
anxiety to help other people when he cabled to her not to marry a
drunkard whom she had merely put to him as a hypothetical case. And she
knew the doctor was inevitably right about the folly of marrying a man
like Louis.

"But he's wrong about there being no cure. When he is with me every
minute and I can look after him as if he is my little baby, he won't be
able to do it. I'll be a gaoler to him--I'll be his providence, his
mother, his nurse, his doctor. Oh everything--I'll be what God was to
father."

Down on Circular Quay she felt she could not go aboard the Oriana yet.
In spite of the unsteadiness of her feet it was very pleasant to be
walking about in a new land, so, taking out Louis's let