fidence in all that concerns your
past life will rest in the hands of the man who may one day be your
husband."

The perfume of the great white trumpet-flower came to her in gusts of
intensified, sickening, loathsome sweetness. She glanced round and saw it
on her right, clasping in its luxuriant embrace a slender young bush that
it was killing. The thick, juicy green stems and succulent green leaves,
the greedily embracing tendrils and great fleshy-white, hanging flowers
revolted her. The creeper seemed the symbolisation of Lust battening upon
Innocence.

Other like images crowded thick and fast upon her. From a mossy cranny in
a stone a hairy tarantula leaped upon a little lizard that sunned itself,
not thinking Death so near. A lightning-quick pounce of the bloated thing
with the fierce, bright eyes and the relentless, greedy claws, and the
little reptile vanished. She shuddered, thinking of its fate.

The blue gums and oaks that fringed the river gorge and the bushes that
grew about were ragged and torn with shell and shrapnel-ball. Chips and
flinders had been knocked by the same forces from the boulders and the
rocks. Amongst the flowers near her shone something bright. It was an
unexploded Maxim-shell, a pretty little messenger of Death, girt with
bright copper bands and gaily painted. And a ninety-four-pound projectile,
exploded, had scattered the shore with its fragments, and doubtless the
river-bed was strewn thick with others. You had only to look to see them.
Once Lynette's lover knew everything there was to know, the trees and
rocks and flowers of the Eden in which every daughter of Eve owns the
right to walk, if only once in a whole lifetime, would be marred and
broken, scorched and spoiled, like these.

Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, seeing what the lives
of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the
veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not the
shadow of a claim. She tossed away her former scruples. They sailed from
her on the faint hot breeze lightly as thistledown. And now the
tear-blurred face was lifted from her bosom, and the voice, hoarse and
weak and trembling, appealed:

"Mother, you are not angry? I never meant to be underhand, or to
hide--anything from you."

"No," she said, hiding the pang it gave her to realise how much had been
concealed between the lines that she had read so often. "You did not mean
to." The tre