lly.

She turned to him quickly.

"Louis, you're to leave this to me. On the _Oriana_ you said you would.
I'm your doctor and I'm prescribing treatment. I may be wrong, but give
me a trial, anyway. I don't want to boss you. I want you to be free. But
you can't till you've learnt how to walk yourself."

And she would say no more, but going to several agencies in Pitt Street
put down their names. She told them she came from a farm in Scotland,
and they seemed very pleased to see her. But when she added that she was
married to an Englishman who had a public-school education they became
sceptical.

"What can he do?" they asked. She hesitated.

"Rouseabout?" asked the clerk. When they explained that this meant being
Jack-of-all-trades on an up-country station, Marcella, in a spirit of
sheer mischief, said that would suit Louis well. She liked the busy
sound of the word, too. But though she called at the agencies day after
day, no one seemed to want her. At last a clerk, an elderly, pleasant
woman explained.

"They're afraid to engage newly married couples on up-country stations
where there are not too many hands for fear they go having children--you
see, that puts a woman out of action for a while and throws all the work
out of gear. If you were forty-five or thereabouts, now."

This seemed an astonishing state of things to Marcella.

The days passed. Louis got up at Christmas time in the blazing heat of
midsummer, looking a shadow of himself. He began to take a greedy
interest in doing things; he made a cupboard for the crockery lent them
by Mrs. King; he made it very well, very carefully, hampered by lack of
tools. He read hungrily all the books Dr. Angus sent to Marcella,
especially lectures and scientific books. He seemed to disagree on
principle with whatever she said, and they had many pleasantly heated
arguments. His mother sent him papers--the "Referee," "Punch," the
"Mirror." He cut out many of the "Punch" pictures and tacked them up
beside the Landseer print, side by side with Will Dyson's cartoons from
the "Bulletin" that Marcella liked. When there was nothing to read or do
he told Marcella yarns of his past, until she grew to know his people
very well. Whenever he felt tempted to lie to her he pulled himself up
pathetically, and she saw that he was really trying to keep his tongue
under control. When everything else palled they played Noughts and
Crosses, or Parson's Cat, or Consequences. Mrs. King had a