about coal, too," remarked Jim. "The only coal
down there is a horrible brownish stuff that falls into damp slack if
you look at it; it's generally used only for furnaces, but people had
to draw their coal allowance from the nearest supply, and it was all she
could get. The only way to use the beastly stuff was to mix it with wet,
salt mud from the river into what the country people call culm--then you
cut it into blocks, or make balls of it, and it hardens. She
couldn't get a man to do it for her, and she used to mix all her culm
herself--and you wouldn't call it woman's work, even in Germany. But she
used to tell it as a kind of joke."

"She used to look on herself as one of the really lucky women," said
David Linton, "because her husband didn't get killed. And I think she
was--herrings and culm and all. And we're even luckier, since we've all
come back to Australia, and to such a welcome as you've given us." He
stood up, smiling his slow, pleasant smile at them all. "And now I
think I've got to go chasing the Customs, if I'm ever to disinter our
belongings and get home."

The girls took possession of Norah and Tommy, who left their menfolk
to the drear business of clearing luggage, and thankfully spent the
afternoon in the Botanical Gardens, glad to have firm ground under
their feet after six weeks of sea. Then they all met at dinner at Mrs.
Geoffrey Linton's, where they found her son, Cecil, who greeted Norah
with something of embarrassment. There was an old score between Norah
and Cecil Linton, although they had not seen each other for years;
but its memory died out in Norah's heart as she looked at her cousin's
military badge and noted that he dragged one foot slightly. Indeed,
there was no room in Norah's heart for anything but happiness.

The aunts and uncles tried hard to persuade David Linton to remain a few
days in Melbourne, but he shook his head.

"I've been homesick for five years," he told them. "And it feels like
fifty. I'll come down again, I promise--yes, and bring the children, of
course. But just now I can't wait. I've got to get home."

"That old Billabong!" said Mrs. Geoffrey, half laughing. "Are you going
to live and die in the backblocks, David?"

"Why, certainly--at least I hope so," he said. "I suppose there must
be lucid intervals, now that Norah is grown up, or imagines she is--not
that she seems to me a bit different from the time when her hair was
down. Still I suppose I must bring he