just as anxious
to hide the trouble from the Twists and knew that she must bear it
alone.

She cried for hours, completely disheartened, longing passionately to go
to him and ask him to assure her it was only a dream, and he really was
cured as she had imagined. But at last she fell asleep, too proud to go
and ask him to come to bed again, guessing that he would sleep in the
living-room.

She wakened early and started up with full recollection of what had
happened. In the light of morning, after a sleep, she was sick with
herself for having forgotten her theory that he was an ill man; she had
let personal annoyance stop her from trying to help him. Brimming over
with love and pity and self-disgust she ran out to find him, for she
guessed he would be penitent now, and in black despair.

He was not there. On the verandah was a "squareface" bottle, empty.
Wakening from a drugged sleep in the grey morning, his mouth ablaze, his
brain muddled and full of resentment against her, he had remembered the
gin he had brought home with him; there was not much left in the bottle.
He drank it, full of resentment against it for making him so unhappy. He
knew that ten pounds--two months' pay--was in the cigarette-box on the
shelf. It was Mr. Twist's birthday next Sunday and they had decided to
give it back to him to buy tools. Louis remembered it; fighting every
inch of the way across the floor with the strength that the last few
months had put into him, he took it out of the box. Then, a thousand
devils at his heels, he dashed off into the Bush on his thirty-mile mad
tramp.

It was a week before she saw him again, and all the time she was aching
to follow him. But she knew she could not walk so far and, with a stern
cussedness typical of her father, she went on with Louis's work, not
mentioning to the Twists that he was away, though they all wondered what
had happened to him. She burned the gorse as though it were whisky,
almost savagely. She tore at the roots in the ground as though they were
the fierce desires of life to be ruthlessly uprooted, smashed out, burnt
to ashes. She was scarcely conscious of emotion; the smoke got into her
eyes and blinded her; stooping to dig made her feel faint and ill, but
in her desperate misery she attacked the work as even Louis in his best
days had never done. It was not until she had been at it nearly a week
that Mrs. Twist found her out, and came across the clearing to her,
looking indignant