old
you that barbarism still had a greater hold than civilisation.

There did not, however, appear to be much of the barbarian about Lady
Bridget. She still looked like an old picture in the high-waisted
tea-gown of limp yellow silk that she had put on early for dinner, and
she still trailed wisps of old lace round her slender shoulders. There
was the same touzle of curly hair, like yellow-brown spun glass or
filaments of burnished copper, which was shining now in the westering
sun. The finely-modelled brows and shadowy eyes were as beautiful as
when Colin McKeith had first beheld his goddess stepping on to
Australian earth.

But for all that, a change had taken place in her--a different one from
the indefinable yet significant change which is felt in almost every
woman after marriage. There is usually in the young wife's face an
expression of fulfilment, of deepened experience--a certain settled,
satisfied look. And this was what was lacking in Lady Bridget's face.
The restless soul within seemed to be peering out through hungry eyes.

She could see nothing human from the veranda except the blue-smocked
figure of Fo Wung, the Chinaman, at work in his vegetable garden by the
lagoon. There was one large water-hole and a succession of small ones,
connected by water-courses, now dry, and meandering from a gully, which
on the eastern side broke the hill against which Moongarr head-station
was built. The straggling gum forest, interspersed with patches of
sandal-wood and mulga, that backed the head-station, stopped short at
the gully, and beyond, stretched wolds of melancholy gidia scrub.
Looking up from the end of the veranda, Lady Bridget could see an
irregular line of grey-brown boulders, jagged and evidently of volcanic
origin, marking the line of gully. These gave a touch of romantic
wildness to the otherwise peaceful scene.

Lady Bridget's gaze went along a track skirting the gidia scrub, and
crossing the lower end of the gully near the lagoon, to the great plain
which spread in front of the head-station. Except for some green trees
by the lagoon, a few ragged belts of gum and sandal-wood or single
isolated trees dotted about, the plain was unwooded to the horizon.
There were also silhouetted upon the sky the grotesque-looking sails of
one or two windmill-pumps. In the foreground the plain was intersected
by lines of grey fencing, within which browsed straggling herds of lean
cattle, mostly along the curve of the l