rick of saying everything twice over. "Needs to clinch his own
opinion!" was Mahony's swift diagnosis. Himself, he kept in the
background. And was he forced to come forward his manner was both stiff
and forbidding, so on tenterhooks was he lest the other should presume
to treat him as anything but the storekeeper he gave himself out to be.

A day or so later who but the wife must arrive to visit Polly!--a piece
of gratuitous friendliness that could well have been dispensed with;
even though Mahony felt it keenly that, at this juncture, Polly should
lack companions of her own sex. But Rogers had married beneath him, and
the sight of the pursy upstart--there were people on the Flat who
remembered her running barefoot and slatternly--sitting there, in satin
and feathers, lording it over his own little Jenny Wren, was more than
Mahony could tolerate. The distance was put forward as an excuse for
Polly not returning the call, and Polly was docile as usual; though for
her part she had thought her visitor quite a pleasant, kindly woman.
But then Polly never knew when she was being patronised!

To wipe out any little trace of disappointment, her husband suggested
that she should write and ask one of the Beamish girls to stay with
her: it would keep her from feeling the days long.

But Polly only laughed. "Long?--when I have so much sewing to do?"

No, she did not want company. By now, indeed, she regretted having sent
off that impulsive invitation to Mrs. Beamish for the end of the year.
Puzzle as she would, she could not see how she was going to put
"mother" comfortably up.

Meanwhile the rains were changing the familiar aspect of the place.
Creeks--in summer dry gutters of baked clay--were now rich red rivers;
and the yellow Yarrowee ran full to the brim, keeping those who lived
hard by it in a twitter of anxiety. The steep slopes of Black Hill
showed thinly green; the roads were ploughed troughs of sticky mire.
Occasional night frosts whitened the ground, bringing cloudless days in
their wake. Then down came the rain once more, and fell for a week on
end. The diggers were washed out of their holes, the Flat became an
untraversable bog. And now there were floods in earnest: the creeks
turned to foaming torrents that swept away trees and the old roots of
trees; and the dwellers on the river banks had to fly for their bare
lives.

Over the top of book or newspaper Mahony watched his wife stitch,
stitch, stitch, with a zea