all the policemen. I knew when I saw her coming that she'd found her.
I didn't seem to care much, only as though something had snapped. It was
only afterwards, when Mary was dead, that I used to get nearly crazy. I
never told anybody, not even my room-mate, that I'd found her.

"She was in the hospital, dying, Mary was. I've heard since how that
awful life kills the tender-hearted ones soon and Mary wasn't 21. She was
in a bleak, bare ward, with a screen round her, and near by you could
hear other girls laughing and shouting. You wouldn't have known her. Only
her eyes were the same, such loving, tender eyes, when she opened them
and saw me. She looked up and saw me standing there by the bedside and
before she could shrink away I put my arms round her neck and kissed her
forehead, where I used to kiss her, because I was the tallest, just where
the hair grew. And I told her that she mustn't mind me and that she was
my dear, dear sister and that she should have let me known because it had
taken me so long to find her. And she didn't say anything but clung tight
to me as though she would never let me go and then all at once her arms
dropped and when I lifted my head she had fainted and her eyelids were
wet.

"She died three days after. I made some excuse to get away and saw her
every day. She hardly spoke she was so weak but she liked to lie with my
hand in hers and me fanning her. She said that first day, when she came
to, that she thought I would come. But she wouldn't have written or
spoken a word, Mary wouldn't. She didn't even ask after the folks at home
or how I was getting on. She said once she was so tired waiting and I
knew she meant waiting to die. She didn't want to live. The last day she
lay with her eyes half-closed, looking at me, and all at once her lips
moved. I bent down to her and heard her murmur: 'I did try, Nellie, I did
try,' and I saw she was crying. I put my arms round her and kissed her on
the forehead and told her that I knew she had, and then she smiled at me,
such a sweet pitiful smile, and then she stopped breathing. That was the
only change.

"I couldn't stay in Brisbane. I was afraid every minute of meeting
somebody who'd known Mary and who might ask me about her, or of father or
uncle or somebody coming down. I wrote home and said I'd found out that
Mary had died in the hospital of fever and they never thought of wanting
to know any more, they were so full of grief. And then I got wondering