Toowoomba used to turn and look at
her when she went out and everybody liked her. She was so kind to
everybody. And she was full of courage though she did cry a little when
she kissed me good-bye, because I cried so. I could never have stopped
crying had I but known how I should see her again.

"She wrote in two or three days to say that she had got a place, just
enough to pay her board, and expected to get a better one soon. She was
always expecting something better when she wrote and my aunt when I saw
her wagged her head and said that rolling stones gathered no moss. The
interest-day came round and father just managed to scrape the money
together. They'd got so poor and downhearted that I used to cry at night
thinking of them and I used to tell Mary when I wrote. I used to blame
myself for it once but I don't now. We all get to believe at last in what
must be will be, Ned. And then I had a letter from Mary telling me she
had a much better place and in two or three weeks mother wrote such a
proud pleased letter to say that Mary had sent them a five-pound note.
And for about a year Mary sent them two or three pounds every month and
at Christmas five pounds again. Then her letters stopped altogether, both
to them and to me. To me she had kept writing always the same, kind and
chatty and about herself. She told me she had to save and scrape a little
but that she had hope some day to be able to get me down. I never dreamed
it was not so, not even when the letters stopped, though afterwards, when
I went through them, I saw that the handwriting, in the later ones, was
shaky a little.

"We waited and waited to hear from her but no letter came to anybody.
There was a girl I knew whose father had been working in Toowoomba and
who was in the same shop for a little while and her father was going to
Brisbane to a job and they were all going. He was a carpenter. She and I
had got to be friendly after Mary went away and she promised to find her
but couldn't. You see we were bush folks still and didn't think anything
of streets and addresses and thought the post office enough. And when two
months passed and no letter came mother wrote half crazy, and I didn't
know what to do, and I wrote to the girl I knew to ask her to get me work
so that I could go to look for Mary. It just happened that they wanted a
body hand in her shop and they promised me the place and I went the next
day I heard. They wanted a week's notice where I was work