ike that." She smiled faintly.
"Let's walk a bit! I shall feel better and I have such a lot to tell you.
Don't interrupt! I want you to know all about it, Ned." And so, walking
backwards and forwards in the moonlit streets, deserted and empty,
passing an occasional night prowler, watched with suspicious eyes by
energetic members of the "foorce" whose beats they invaded, stopping at
corners or by dead-walls, then moving slowly on again, she told him.

* * * * *

"You know how things were at home on the Darling Downs, Ned. Father a
'cooky,' going shearing to make both ends meet, and things always going
wrong, what with the drought and the wet and having no money to do things
right and the mortgage never being cleared off. It wasn't particularly
good land, either, you know. The squatters had taken all that and left
only stony ridges for folks like ours. And we were all girls, six of us.
Your father was sold up, and he had you boys to help him. Well, my father
wasn't sold up but he might as well have been. He worked like a horse and
so did mother, what with the cows and the fowls and looking after things
when father was away, and we girls did what we could from the time we
were little chits. Father used to get up at daybreak and work away after
dark always when he was at home. On Sunday mornings after he'd seen to
the things he used to lie on his back under that tree in front if it was
fine or about the house if it was wet, just dead beat. He used to put a
handkerchief over his face but he didn't sleep much. He just rested. In
the afternoon he used to have a smoke and a read. Poor father! He was
always thought queer, you recollect, because he didn't care for
newspapers except to see about farming in and took his reading out of
books of poetry that nobody else cared about. On Monday he'd start to
work again, with only a few hours for sleep and meals, till Saturday
night. Yet we had only just a living. Everything else went in interest on
the mortgage. Twelve per cent. Mother used to cry about it sometimes but
it had to be paid somehow.

"When Mary was fifteen and I was thirteen, you remember, she went to
Toowoomba, to an uncle of ours, mother's brother, who had four boys and
no girls and didn't know what to put the boys to. Father and mother
thought this a splendid chance for Mary to learn a trade, there were so
many of us at home, you know, and so they took one of my cousins and
uncle took Mary and she started to learn dre