felt guilty at
having worried him.

"But I never mentioned marrying Louis! I simply said he was one of the
passengers I was interested in."

There was a letter from Aunt Janet written after the _Oriana_ had sailed
and sent overland to Marseilles.

"I certainly miss you," she wrote, "but I shall get over it in time, I
expect. One gets very used to everything in time. I wonder if you will
ever come back? I expect so. Wullie the Hunchback came along with fish
for me twice. He misses you badly. You were always a great deal with
him."

Letters from Mrs. Mactavish and from Wullie, dictated to and written by
Bessie, said that she would be back soon; standing under the portico of
the Post Office, surrounded by the flower sellers with their bunches of
exuberant waratah, feathery wattle and sweet, sober-looking boronia, she
let her mind travel back to Lashnagar and the acrid smoke of the
green-wood fires, the pungency of the fish, the sharp tang of the salt
winds pushed the heavy perfume of flowers aside. In a moment the last
six weeks of mad, unhappy dreaming and hoping vanished; she saw herself
back again in her own sphere among her own people. She tried to picture
Louis there, too, and realized horribly that he would never fit into the
picture. Against Wullie and the doctor and her aunt he would look so
vulgar, so pretentious, so tinsel-coloured. And how they would laugh at
a man who could not master himself, a man who cried!

"Why, I'm a snob! I was hurt when he thought I'd disgrace him by my bad
manners. And now I'm being just as cruel!"

Then she jerked herself away from Lashnagar and stood with the last
letter in her hand, afraid to open it. It was postmarked Melbourne and
had come in that morning. It was in Louis's writing, and gave her an
acute sense of distress. She stood still by a shop window, looking into
it blindly until she realized that she was looking at a crocodile and
some snakes squirming about in tanks in a naturalist's window. The
straggly writing reminded her of the ugly snakes: it told her that he
was drunk more or less when the letter was written; she looked from the
letter to the snakes. One of them crawled writhingly over the others,
lifted its head and put out its tongue at her: shivering, she opened the
letter.

"MY OWN DARLING,

"Wasn't it a sell? That damned captain's had a down on me all the trip. I
reported him to the shipping company and I'm trying to get a free pass
from them by rail