le Lashcairn grew more and more beautiful;
the books arrived from Sydney and kept sentry on the white shelf.
Several of her unnecessary frocks Marcella made into cushions stuffed
with dried lucerne which made a most interesting crackling noise when
one leaned against them. Louis spent most of his Sundays in making a cot
for his son but his fatal lack of thoroughness was a drawback, for it
seemed to come to pieces as quickly as he got it together. Marcella
looked after the fowls and the cows; she did most of the cooking at the
Homestead; she got the children beyond the hanger and pothook stage of
writing and filled their minds, hitherto worried by family cares, with
legend and fairy-tale. She wrote often to Dr. Angus, and he sent her
books and garden seeds. All the time she and Louis never found a moment
in which to be idle; about eleven o'clock every day she took his lunch
across the clearing to him; she collaborated a good deal with Mrs.
Beeton in making various ambitious dishes for him, but as they were
almost entirely made of mutton, "standard" flour and eggs, there was not
much variety. When the fried sheep had lived too long before being
killed, or been kept too long after death, they spent considerable time
looking at the pretty pictures in the cookery book: Marcella told of
Wullie's feasts in the beach-hut. Louis remembered restaurant
celebrations. But they were always too hungry to care much what they
ate; the most leathery damper, the most difficult mutton was pleasant
eaten out of doors in the faint smoke of the gorse fires.

During the afternoons she helped with the gorse grubbing. Before the
great bushes could be approached they had to be fired, and she loved to
watch the golden blaze flare swiftly to the sky, leaving a pall of grey
smoke through which the carbonized gorse branches shone gold for a
moment in a fairy tracery before crumbling to white ash on the ground.
Then they had to take pickaxes and mattocks, chisels and spades to chop
down the parent stem and uproot the smallest leader from the roots.
Gorse is very tenacious of life. A root of only a few inches will spring
up to a great tree in an incredibly short time, especially on virgin
soil fertilized by many burnings.

They had faces perpetually blackened by smoke. Marcella worked with an
oilskin bathing-cap sent by Mrs. King, over her hair; she wore an old
blue overall on which the spines of the gorse had worked havoc. And
still she would not be