ide him. He resented it bitterly.

"Damned schoolmistress," he growled. "Always round me, like a limpet."
In his eyes she read a flash of hate.

"My dear, do you think I want to be a limpet?" she said, "if I don't you
know we'll never catch the train when it starts again."

"Never have a free hand," he muttered.

She was puzzled. It seemed impossible to keep a constant watch on a man
of Louis's temperament. He resented her vigilance though he demanded it.
If she seemed to be leading him, he bolted. If she let him have his
head, he still bolted.

When they were in the train again, drawing away through miles of scrub
further and further from the cities, she felt very glad that the strain
was going to end soon: she would get a rest and so would he where
probably he would have to go fifty miles to get a drink. But she
tormented herself with the fear that inaccessibility was not going to
strengthen him; rather it would weaken, she was afraid.

At five o'clock the second day the train, which had dwindled down to one
coach and five trucks, rattled and groaned into Cook's Wall. The station
consisted of a rough wooden platform raised on wooden supports with a
weather-board hut which the stationmaster called porter's room,
booking-office, luggage-office and station hotel. Someone had
ambitiously painted the name on the station. "COOK'S WAL" and "STATION
HOT" appeared in green letters on the face of the structure. "L" and
"EL" appeared round the corner in red.

The surroundings of the station looked quite hopeless; a few sun-baked
sheep-pens and races stretched behind the Station Hotel, shimmering and
wavering in the heat haze; half a mile away was a collection of
home-made huts consisting of boxes and kerosene tins piled on top of
each other. A primitive winding-gear and a heap of slag marked the
position of a small manganese mine which had been the cause for
prolonging the single line railway so far into the Bush. To the west and
south and north stretched scrub and bush, right away to forest and
purple hills on the far horizon. Eastward the glittering rails shone
back to the city, sending out blinding little flashes of light as the
sun caught them.

The guard and driver got leisurely out of the train and stood on the
platform; the stationmaster-cum-porter-cum-hotel-keeper, in a pair of
dungaree trousers and a dusty vest of flesh-coloured cellular material
which gave him the effect of nakedness, stared at them as though