Life had been particularly hard upon Mary Gordon, but it had given her the love of two men to compensate for the years of unnatural harshness when, as a teamster’s girl, she had accompanied her father on the tracks with his bullocks and the great table-top wagon, doing the cooking, often hunting the bullocks in the early morning, sometimes even driving the team when her father was too drunk and lay helpless atop the load. After he had died-beneath one of the wheels-she went into service at the station homesteads until John Gordon married her and took her to Meena, his leasehold property of three hundred thousand acres.

She had never become quite used to John Gordon’s affection, for when one is thirty-four, and has never known affection, affection never ceases to be strange. Of course, she had paid life for it, paid in anguish over years which had begun when they brought home the poor body and the minister from Opal Town consigned it to rest beside John the First in the little station cemetery.

John the Third was at school down in Adelaide, a mere boy of sixteen. He had at once returned home and demanded to stay at home to learn the management of sheep and the affairs of this small station property. Like his father in so many things, the son was like him in his steady affection for her.

History repeats itself! Time to pay again!

Ah, no! No, no, no! It won’t! It can’t! It mustn’t! Oh, why don’t they come home?

No longer could Mary support the intolerable inactivity. Turning back into the room, she slipped on an oilskin coat and lit a hurricane lamp, and with this small light to assist her she stepped off the veranda down to the wet ash path of the small garden and traversed it to the low gate in the wicket fence. Away from the iron veranda roof the night was less noisy and permitted the little sounds to reach her ears-the pattering of the rain on the gleaming coat, on the trees, on the ground. It thudded on her hands and on her face like the tips of nervous fingers urging her to go to him she loved. Besides those made by the rain there were no other sounds, no sound of creaking saddles, of hoof falls, of jangling bits in the mouths of horses eager to be home.