"I saw him and Peters sleeping out in the Domain that wet night. I was
going to sleep there too, because I was afraid to come home to you. They
told me they were starving. The kiddie had got his pyjamas in a bundle.
All their other baggage had gone somewhere--probably seized for rent
somewhere. Serves the old fool right, spending all his tin on that
little widow!"

"But where's Jimmy?" she cried, starting up to fetch him.

"I don't know. I gave him a shilling to get a feed, and the old chap
came and had a few drinks with me. I forget what happened then. I expect
the Salvation Army 'll get the kid--if they can get him from the
Chinks."

That night she was tortured by Jimmy. Then she was tortured by all the
children in all the worlds, especially those children who had no mother,
and more especially those children whose fathers were chained as Mr.
Peters was. She could not leave Louis while she went to search for
Jimmy, whom she would have kidnapped without a second thought if she
could. Next day Louis, though sane, was very ill with gastritis, and
though several of Mrs. King's lodgers went from Domain to hotel, from
hotel to the police, and from the police to the Salvation Army, they
could not trace Jimmy. She never saw him again; he lived in her mind, a
constant torment, the epitome of victimization, gallantly loyal and
valiant even in homelessness and starvation.

CHAPTER XVIII

While Louis was so weak and ill Marcella came to several conclusions.
The first was that they must leave Sydney at once; the second was that
Louis must be made to work if he would not be persuaded to work
willingly. In work, it seemed to her now, lay his salvation much more
than in imprisonment, even though she should have him imprisoned in a
nursing home, under treatment. And in getting away from Sydney lay her
own salvation. It was high summer; the heat to her, after the cool
exhilaration of the Highlands, was terrific; very often the thermometer
she borrowed from Dutch Frank's bedroom registered a hundred and twenty
degrees in their room, and the close intimacy of life in one room was
becoming appalling to her. While he was in bed she was happy in a purely
negative way; very soon happiness came to mean to her the state of
quiescence when he was not drunk. They had cleared up many things, and
though she was glad to have got to the bedrock of truth about him at
last she was sick with disillusionment, and a self-disgust at having
b