of primal conditions had
been overpowered by their discomfort. Nature had never intended her for
the wife of a backwoodsman. At times she felt an almost unendurable
craving for the ordinary luxuries of civilisation. The bathing
appliances here--or rather, the lack of them--were often positive
torture to her. She hated the food--continual coarse beef varied by
stringy goats' flesh or game from the lagoon. She had come to loathe
wild duck--when the men had time to shoot it. She could never bring
herself to destroy harmless creatures, and was a rank coward over
firearms. Talk of the simple life! Why, it was only since they had got
Fo Wung that there had been any vegetables. And the climate--though the
short winter had been pleasant enough as a whole--was abominable. The
long summer heat, the flies and the mosquitoes! What had she not
suffered the first summer after her marriage! And now the hot weather
was coming again. That was not the root of the trouble,
however--Bridget was honest enough to confess it. The root lay in
herself--in her own instability of purpose, her mercurial temperament.
She had been born with that temperament. All the O'Haras loved
change--hungered after strong sensation. She was spoiling now for
emotional excitement.

Well, the little human drama of the Blacks' camp had taken her out of
herself for an hour or two. It had been so funny to see Oola stroking
the lace frills of Lady Bridget's old petticoat and looking up at Wombo
with frank coquetry as she mimicked the 'White Mary's' gestures and
gait. Lady Bridget meant to stand by the savage lovers. She would not
allow Colin to treat them badly when he came back.

Ninnis, the overseer, broke upon her restless meditations. He was a
rough specimen, originally raised in Texas, who, after knocking about
in his youth as a cow-boy in the two Americas, had come to Australia
about fifteen years previously, had 'free-selected' disastrously, and,
during the last five years, had been in McKeith's employ. He was
devoted to his master, but he looked upon McKeith's marriage as a
pernicious investment. His republican upbringing could not stomach the
'Ladyship,' and he persisted in calling Lady Bridget Mrs McKeith. He
considered her flighty and extravagant in her ideas, and was always
divided between unwilling fascination and grumpy disapproval. To-night
he was in the latter mood and this incensed Lady Bridget.

'I've been writing up the log,' he began in a surly,