sure, but her playmate in the old days, nevertheless,
as lads who have no sisters are apt to be with admiring little girls who
have no brothers. Selectors' children, both of them, from neighbouring
farms, born above the frost line under the smelting Queensland sun,
drifted hither and thither by the fitful gusts of Fate as are the
paper-sailed ships that boys launch on flood water pools, meeting here in
Sydney after long years of separation. Now, Nellie was a dressmaker in a
big city shop, and Ned a sun-burnt shearer to whom the great trackless
West was home. She thought of the old home sadly as she stood there
waiting for him.

It had not been a happy home altogether and yet, and yet--it was better
than this. There was pure air there, at least, and grass up to the door,
and trees rustling over-head; and the little children were brown and
sturdy and played with merry shouts, not with these vile words she heard
jabbered in the wretched street. Her heart grew sick within her--a
habit it had, that heart of Nellie's--and a passion of wild revolt
against her surroundings made her bite her lips and press her nails
against her palms. She looked across at the group opposite. More children
being born! Week in and week out they seemed to come in spite of all the
talk of not having any more. She could have cried over this holocaust of
the innocents, and yet she shrank with an unreasoning shrinking from the
barrenness that was coming to be regarded as the most comfortable state
and being sought after, as she knew well, by the younger married women.
What were they all coming to? Were they all to go on like this without a
struggle until they vanished altogether as a people, perhaps to make room
for the round-cheeked, bland-faced Chinaman who stood in the doorway of
his shop in the crossing thorough-fare, gazing expressionlessly at her?
She loathed that Chinaman. He always seemed to be watching her, to be
waiting for something. She would dream of him sometimes as creeping upon
her from behind, always with that bland round face. Yet he never spoke to
her, never insulted her, only he seemed to be always watching her, always
waiting. And it would come to her sometimes like a cold chill, that this
yellow man and such men as he were watching them all slowly going down
lower and lower, were waiting to leap upon them in their last
helplessness and enslave them all as white girls were sometimes enslaved,
even already, in those filthy opium joi