I say, ole girl! You won't yell out, will you?
Ole girl--show them how an Eng--Eng--can die!"

She watched him, fascinated, her back against the door. With a look of
infinite cunning he began to search his pockets and produced a bundle of
papers, ordinary note-paper, pale grey with an embossed address and
telephone number at the top. He handed them to her solemnly.

"If they get me, ta' these! Lea' me! Le' me die f'r ole flag! Braved a
thous' years batt' and the breeze! Ta' these to the Gov'-Genral! He mus'
sen' these to King George! May save Buck'm Pal's! If all else falls,
mus' save Buck'm Pal's, Marshella! King George unstans code--all in
code--"

She took them dazedly in her hands. She saw that on the whitewashed wall
against which he had almost stuck himself was a great patch of wet from
his drowned clothes. He was standing with a pool of water dripping from
him; his blazing eyes were darting this way and that in terror, his
mouth was working loosely. Occasionally he lost power of speech entirely
and regained it with didactic distinctness for a few moments. He made
ineffectual grabs at Marcella, but his shaking hands failed to reach
her. His inflamed brain searched back to every horrible physical thing
he had read, or seen, every operation he had watched; his morbid
condition made them things of obscenity, atrocity. He repeated them all
to her with such circumstantial and guileless exactitude that her brain
reeled, and still she stood by the door, keeping out she knew not what.
Watching her face growing whiter, more pinched, he remembered things
done to women by madmen--and said them aloud.

She glanced at the bundle of papers in her hand, wondering where she
could hide them from his enemies. Opening them out so that she could
fold them better she read the top page. It was written in thin, Italian
handwriting, the typical caligraphy of the upper-class woman of middle
age.

"My own Darling Boy," she read.

"I enclose the usual pound from the Pater. Also five shillings each from
Mary and myself to get you some cigarettes and chocolates. I hope you
can get that nice milk chocolate you like so much in Australia. My dear,
I hope and pray every day that you will remember that promise you gave
me at Tilbury. When I see other mothers with big sons I feel I can't
bear your being right at the other side of the world. Mrs. Cornell came
in with Rupert to-day, and for the first time in my life I felt I hated
them both. T