plicity, for of
course I knew by this time exactly what it was like. But I wanted to
change her thoughts.

She led the way indoors, and pointed to a sheaf of unmounted
photographs. I took them up, and examined them as if for the first time.
My heart sank as I looked at the inoffensive figure of the poor old
uncle in the verandah, whom Aunt Emmy was of course to nurse. The house
which that hard-working old man had built himself stood nakedly upon a
piece of naked ground. There was not a tree near it. Beyond were the
great cattle-yards and farm buildings, and what looked like an endless,
shrubless field. And on the right was the new two-windowed room, no
longer very new, which Mr. Kingston had built seventeen years ago for
Aunt Emmy. I knew how much labour that hideous addition meant, which was
a sort of degraded cousin many times removed from the pert villa
drawing-rooms, peering over portugal laurels on the road to Muddington.
I knew that Mr. Kingston had papered and painted that room with his own
hands. I knew also, but Aunt Emmy did not, that he had repapered and
repainted it several times while it waited for her. And yet by no
wildest effort of the imagination could I picture Aunt Emmy living
there, though her heart had been there all her life.

A sudden rage rose within me against the deceased Uncle Thomas, and
against this other decrepit uncle, waiting to be nursed.

I laid down the photographs, and went a turn in the forest, leaving Aunt
Emmy sitting idle in her gardening gloves. My foolish words had stopped
her happy activity. I was angry with myself, with Fate, with Australia,
with everything, and not least with Mr. Kingston.

Everywhere in the bare glades little orphaned families of bracken held
their arched necks a few inches from the ground. Even in their
bereavement they too had remembered that it was autumn, and their tiny
curled fronds protecting their downcast faces were golden and ruddy. As
I turned a corner I suddenly caught sight of Mr. Kingston a few paces
from me, looking earnestly at one of these little groups. I did not want
to meet him just then, and I half turned aside; but he had already seen
me, and he gave a gesture of welcome, and I had to stop.

My anger subsided somewhat as he came up. He looked harassed, and as if
he had not slept.

"And so you are back," he said. "I was just wishing that you were at the
moment I caught sight of you. If you think it possible that a word or
two could