urse," said Louis miserably.

"No it won't. It's sure to be a foaming torrent if I say it shall.
Didn't you know I was a witch?" she told him, and she was certainly more
right than he, for that night they camped under great eucalyptus trees
beside a water-course which ran deep and still at their feet. The first
thing they did was to gather wood and make a great fire. After the day's
anxiety about water it was intoxicating to know that unlimited
quantities were to be dipped up and made into tea. While the water
boiled they splashed about in the water, shaking sand out of the folds
of their underclothes and their hair.

They had brought eggs and flour and salt. Louis, looking pleased with
himself, produced a tin of Eno's Fruit Salt.

"Always take this stuff into the Bush," he explained. "If you can only
get muddy water, this makes it more possible. And it's dashed good stuff
for making damper less damping."

He put in too much and the damper was so light that it crumbled and got
mixed up in the wood ashes. But they were both too hungry to notice
whether they were eating damper or wood ash, and much too blissful to
care.

They spread the blankets against the roots of a great tree, over a bed
of heathery scrub, very soft and springy; they had no axe or any means
of chopping wood, but there was a thick carpet of dead stuff under the
trees. Noticing dead branches hanging by thin strips of bark Marcella
made a lasso with the swag straps and pulled them down. As far as warmth
went, there was no need for fire at all as soon as the meal was cooked:
but out there in the vast purple-blackness of the night with pin-points
of starlight in the illimitable loneliness the rose and gold of the
spurting flames was comforting and comradely. They piled the dead wood
upon it before they lay down; as one resinous branch after another
caught fire the trees danced round in giant shadows, as though they were
doing a death-dance for their limbs on the funeral pyre. The silence was
a complete blank except when a flapping of wings beat the air where some
bird changed its night perch, or a parrot squawked hoarsely for a
moment, causing a fluttering of smaller wings that soon settled to
silence again.

Louis rolled over; like Marcella he had been lying on his back, staring
through the trees at the stars. His hand sought hers and held it,
quivering a little.

"You know, it's going to be a hell of a fight, Marcella," he said.

"Oh my dear, do