breaking; the moon, but an hour back a globe of polished
silver, had now no light left in her, and stole, a misty ghost, across
the dun-coloured sky. A bank of clouds that had had their night-camp on
the summit of Mount Warrenheip was beginning to disperse; and the air
had lost its edge. He walked out beyond the cemetary, then sat down on
a tree-stump and looked back. The houses that nestled on the slope were
growing momently whiter; but the Flat was still sunk in shadow and
haze, making old Warrenheip, for all its half-dozen miles of distance,
seem near enough to be touched by hand. But even in full daylight this
woody peak had a way of tricking the eye. From the brow of the western
hill, with the Flat out of sight below, it appeared to stand at the
very foot of those streets that headed east--first of one, then of
another, moving with you as you changed position, like the eyes of a
portrait that follow you wherever you go.--And now the sky was streaked
with crimson-madder; the last clouds scattered, drenched in orange and
rose, and flames burned in the glass of every window-pane. Up came the
tip of the sun's rim, grew to a fiery quarter, to a half; till,
bounding free from the horizon, it began to mount and to lose its girth
in the immensity of the sky.

The phantasms of the night yielded like the clouds to its power. He was
still reasonably young, reasonably sound, and had the better part of a
lifetime before him. Rising with a fresh alacrity, he whistled to his
dog, and walked briskly home to bath and breakfast.

But that evening, at the heel of another empty day, his nervous
restlessness took him anew. From her parlour Polly could hear the thud
of his feet, going up and down, up and down his room. And it was she
who was to blame for disturbing him!

"Yet what else could I do?"

And meditatively pricking her needle in and out of the window-curtain,
Polly fell into a reverie over her husband and his ways. How strange
Richard was ... how difficult! First, to be able to forget all about
how things stood with him, and then to be twice as upset as other
people.

John demanded the immediate delivery of his young son, undertaking soon
to knock all nasty tricks out of him. On the day fixed for Johnny's
departure husband and wife were astir soon after dawn. Mahony was to
have taken the child down to the coach-office. But Johnny had been
awake since two o'clock with excitement, and was now so fractious that
Polly tied