, said that she would be as safe in Mrs.
Twist's care, with him hovering in the background, as though she had
gone to the nursing home in Sydney, as he had suggested at first.

"I shall funk awfully to know you're going through it, old lady," he
told her. "You know nothing about it yet. I've seen this thing happen
dozens of times, and it's much worse than you imagine."

She decided, privately, to spare him the misery of it all by sending him
off into the Bush on an errand for Mr. Twist as soon as she was taken
ill. But her scheme fell through. All one day of blue and silver in
June, a winter's day with keen exhilaration in the air, she stayed with
him in the clearing, burning the branches as he hewed them down. She
felt scarcely alive. Her body was a queer, heavy, racked and
apprehensive thing down on the ground. She watched it slowly walking
about, dragging faggots of gorse fastened together by the swag-straps
which she loosened as she cast the branches cracking and creaking into
the flames. Her mind was restless, a little fey. Louis, seeing something
of her uncertainty, stopped work early, and they walked home slowly over
the cleared land that was now being ploughed.

"I feel proud of it, don't you?" she said, looking back. He nodded,
watching her anxiously.

As she was making the tea pain, quite unbearable, seized her. She got
out on the verandah so that he should not see her. After a while it
passed and, looking white, she came back into the room.

"I was going across to the Homestead to-night. Jerry's got a new record
and wants to try it on us. But I feel tired. Will you ask Mrs. Twist to
come and have a gossip?" she said casually.

The pain came back, quite astonishing her. She had heard that it was
horrible, but had not expected it to be quite so horrible as this. Her
mind had only room for one thought--that Louis must not suspect--or, in
his anxiety; he would lose grip on himself and make away for Cook's
Wall and oblivion. Going into her bedroom she took pencil and paper and
wrote a note to Mrs. Twist, who understood the plot and was ready to
invent some lost sheep for Jerry and Louis to hunt up.

"Can you come up? I think it's happening to me. Please send Louis away,"
she wrote, and folded the note into an envelope which she fastened down.
That moment she found herself crying out without her own volition. She
slammed the door and lay down on the floor inside it, to barricade it
against Louis. She heard h