-grass, and the sturdy berry-bushes, high as her knee, through
which she had ploughed her way. That was one of the moments she liked
best, that, and lying in bed at night listening to the roar of the
surf, which went on and on like a cannonade, even though the hill lay
between. It made her flesh crawl, too, in delightful fashion, did she
picture to herself how alone she and Pin were, in their room: the boys
slept in the lean-to on the other side of the kitchen; old Anne at the
back. For miles round, no house broke the solitude of the bush; only a
thin wooden partition separated her from possible bushrangers, from the
vastness and desolation of the night, the eternal booming of the sea.

Such was the life into which Laura now threw herself heart and soul,
forgetting, in the sheer joy of living, her recent tribulation.

But even the purest pleasures WILL pall; and after a time, when the
bloom had worn off and the newness and her mind was more at leisure
again, she made some disagreeable discoveries which ruffled her
tranquillity.

It was Pin, poor, fat, little well-meaning Pin, who did the mischief

Pin was not only changed in looks; her character had changed, too; and
in so marked a way that before a week was out the sisters were at
loggerheads. Each day made it plainer to Laura that Pin was developing
a sturdy independence; she had ceased to look up to Laura as a prodigy
of wisdom, and had begun to hold opinions of her own. She was, indeed,
even disposed to be critical of her sister; and criticism from this
quarter was more than Laura could brook: it was just as if a slave
usurped his master's rights. At first speechless with surprise, she
ended by losing her temper; the more, because Pin was prone to be
mulish, and could not be got to budge, either by derision or by scorn,
from her espoused views. They were those of the school at which for the
past half-year she had been a day-pupil, and seemed to her
unassailable. Laura found them ridiculous, as she did much else about
Pin at this time: her ugliness, her setting herself up as an authority:
and she jeered unkindly whenever Pin came out with them.--A still more
ludicrous thing was that, despite her plainness, Pin actually had an
admirer. True, she did not say so outright; perhaps she was not even
aware of it; but Laura gathered from her talk that a boy at her school,
a boy some three years older than herself, had given her a silk
handkerchief and liked to help her wi