t
it? The end HAS come.... You're sick of the whole show--dead sick--of
the Bush--of everything?--Aren't you? Answer me straight, Bridget.'

'Yes, I am,' she replied recklessly. 'I hate the Bush--I--I hate
everything.'

'Everything! Well, that settles it!' he said slowly.

Again there was silence, and then he said:

'You know I wouldn't want to keep you--especially now,'--he did not add
the words that were on his lips 'now that bad times are coming on
me,'--and she read a different application in the 'now.' 'I--I'd be
glad for you to quit. It's as you please--maybe the sooner the better.
I'll make everything as easy as I can for you.'

'You are very--considerate....' The sarcasm broke in her throat.

She moved abruptly, and stood gazing out over the plain till the
hysterical, choking sensation left her. Her back was to him. He could
not see her face; nor could she see the dumb agony in his.

Presently she walked to a shelf-table on the veranda set against the
wall; and from the litter of papers and work upon it, took up the
cablegram she had lately received.

'I wanted to show you this,' she said stonily, and handed him the blue
paper.

There was something significant in the way he steadied it upon the
veranda railing, and stooped with his head down to pore over it.

The blow was at first almost staggering. It was as though the high gods
had shot down a bolt from heaven, shattering his world, and leaving him
alone in Chaos. They had taken him at his word--had registered on the
instant his impious declaration. It WAS the end of everything. She was
to quit.... He had said, the sooner the better.... Well--he wasn't
going to let even the high gods get a rise out of him.

He laughed. By one of those strange links of association, which at
moments of unexpected crisis bring back things impersonal, unconnected,
the sound of his own laugh recalled the rattle of earth, upon the dry
outside of a sheet of bark in which, during one of their boundary rides
at Breeza Downs lately, they had wrapped for burial the body of a
shepherd found dead in the bush. Both sounds seemed to him as of
something dead--something outside humanity.

He handed her back the telegram, speaking still as if he were
far-off--on the other side of a grave, but quite collectedly and as
though in the long silence he had been weighing the question.

'It seems to me that this has come to you in the nick of time, to solve
difficulties.'

'Yes,' she