s of letters dating much
further back than his occupation of Moongarr--salvage from the wreck of
his old home. His mother's workbox; his father's SHAKESPEARE; the
family Bible--a piteous catalogue. He looked long at the book and the
photographs. These last were portraits of his father, his mother and
his sisters, who had all been massacred by the Blacks, when he was a
boy. He separated all such relics from the general lot, placing them,
and also two or three packets of papers upon a shelf-table in the
veranda--it was that table where Lady Bridget had laid the cablegram
from Lord Gaverick, which she had shown him the day before she had left
Moongarr. Now it seemed to him an altar of sacred memories. He brought
various other small things out of the parlour--things he had not the
heart to destroy--all belonging to his youth--and placed them there. As
he looked at them, a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and a wave of
emotion passed over his face, softening its hardness for an instant.
But the grimness came back. He made a quick movement back to Lady
Bridget's room; and when, after a minute or two, he came out again, he
was carrying a curious object which he had taken out of the deep drawer
beneath her hanging wardrobe. It was a dry piece of gum-tree bark,
shrivelled and curled up at the sides, so that the two edges almost
met. At first he put it on the heap that he had turned out of the
portmanteaux for destruction. His grim thought had been to top with
this strange memorial of his marriage-night, the funeral pyre he had
intended to build. But again the spasm of emotion contorted his
features. His shoulders shook, and a dry choking sound came from his
lips. He took up the piece of bark too, and laid it with the
daguerreotypes on the table. He seemed afraid to give himself time to
think, but went from room to room here and in the Old Humpey, dragging
one thing after another out on to the veranda. Some of the heavier
articles he had to hoist over the steps connecting the two verandas,
and then to drag them down the other steps into the front garden, where
they strewed the gravel round the centre bed.

In spring and summer, when the Chinamen had been there to water and
Lady Bridget to superintend the planting and pruning, this bed had
always been gay with flowers, banking a tall shrub of scented verbena
the perfume of which she had been particularly fond of. Now there were
weeds--most of them withered--instead of flowers.