t up soon. I never dreamed
of going to the police station, any more than we had dreamed of it in
Toowoomba. I just looked and looked but I couldn't find her.

"I shall never forget the first time I got out of work. One Saturday,
without a minute's warning, a lot of us were told that we wouldn't be
wanted for a week or two. Lizzie and I were both told. She could hardly
keep herself from crying but I couldn't cry. I was too wretched. I
thought of everything and there seemed nothing to do anywhere. At home
they couldn't help me. I shrank from asking aunt, for she'd only offered
to help me to come back and what could I do in Toowoomba if I got there?
And how could I find Mary? I had only ten shillings in the world and I
owed it all for my board. I got to imagining where I should sleep and how
long I could go without dying of hunger and I hated so to go into the
house with Lizzie to tell them. Lizzie's mother cried when she heard it
and Lizzie cried, but I went into the bedroom when I'd put my money on
the table and began to put my things in my box. They called me to dinner
and when I didn't come and they found out that I meant to go because I
couldn't pay any more they were so angry. Lizzie's mother wanted to know
if they looked altogether like heathens and then we three cried like
babies and I felt better. I used to cry a good deal in those days, I
think.

"Lizzie's father got a job next week a few miles out of Brisbane and went
away to it and on the Monday I answered an advertisement for a woman to
do sewing in the house and was the first and got it. She was quite young,
the woman I worked for, and very nice. She got talking to me and I told
her how I'd got out of work and about Mary. I suppose she was Socialist
for she talked of what I didn't understand much then, of how we ought to
have a union to get wages enough to keep us when work fell off and of the
absurdity of men and women having to depend for work upon a few employers
who only worked them when they could get profit. She thought I should go
to the police-station about Mary but I said Mary wouldn't like that. What
was more to me at the time, she paid me four shillings a day and found me
work for two weeks, though I don't think she wanted it. There are kind
people in the world, Ned.

"I got back to regular work again, not in the same shop but in another,
and then Lizzie's folks moved out to where her father was working. I and
another girl got a room that we paid