boriginal can cast upon another. It means death or the direst
misfortune. All that the afflicted one can do is to fly--to hide
himself beyond the sorcerer's ken and the reach of pursuit. For this
reason, Wombo and Oola had fled back to Moongarr. No outside black
dared venture within range of McKeith's gun. Now Wombo and Oola
besought Bridget to hide them from the vengeful furies. There was that
slab and bark hut at the end of the kitchen and store wing. Nobody was
likely at present to want to go into it. The door had a padlock, and it
was used as a store-house for the hides of beasts that had been killed
for the sake of the skins when in the last stage of pleuro. The key was
always kept hung up in McKeith's office.

Here Lady Bridget installed Wombo and Oola. She brought them cooked
meat, bread and a ration of tea and sugar, provided them with a pair of
blankets, and found for Wombo some old moleskins, a shirt, and a pair
of boots, while Oola almost forgot the medicine man's evil spell in her
puzzled delight over a lacey undergarment and a discarded kimono
dressing-grown, which had been part of Lady Bridget's trousseau. That
excitement over, the lonely mistress of Moongarr went back to her own
habitation. She ate her solitary dinner and paced the veranda till
darkness fell and the haunted loneliness became an almost unbearable
oppression. Vast plains, distant ranges, gidia scrub and the far
horizon melted into an illimitable shadow. The world seemed boundless
as the starry sky--and yet she was in prison! She had longed for the
freedom of the wild, and her life was more circumscribed than ever. A
phrase in an Australian poem, that had struck her when she had read it
not long ago came back upon her with poignant meaning. 'Eucalyptic
cloisterdom'--that was the phrase, and it was this to which she had
condemned herself. The gum trees enclosed for her one immense cell and
she had become utterly weary of her mental and her spiritual
incarceration. Oh! for the sting of love's strong emotion to break the
monotony. The most sordid sights and sounds of London streets, the most
inane babble of a fashionable crowd would be more stimulating to her
brain, sweeter in her ears than the arid expanse, the weird bush
noises--howl of dingoes, wail of curlews, lowing of cattle--that a year
ago had seemed so eerily fascinating.

Even her marriage! The romance of it had faded, as it were, into the
dull drab of withered gum leaves. The charm