ad
denied to her.

"Maisie has talked many times of Australia, my lady. She talks on, so I
could not repeat much."

"You mean she jumps from one thing to another?"

"Yes, so I cannot always follow her. But she has told me a many things
of her life there. How at first she would never see a soul at the farm
from week's end to week's end, and her husband got to own all the land
about."

"Do you think she is really alive to her husband's villainy? _I_
sometimes think she forgets all about it."

"Please God she does so! 'Tis better for her she should. I would have
felt happier if she could have known me, and Ruth, and never had the
tale of his wickedness."

"But that was impossible, Granny. She _must_ have known, in the end."

"That is so, I know, my lady. But when I hear her forget it all, it
makes my heart glad. When she gets to telling of the old time, on the
farm, her mind is off it, and I thank God that it should be so, for her
sake! Friday last she was talking so happy, you could not have known her
for the same."

"About the farm and the convicts? Do recollect some of the things she
told you!"

"There was a creature they hunt with dogs, that leaps on its hind-legs
to any height."

"Oh yes--the Kangaroo."

"She called it something else--something like 'Boomer.'" This did not
matter. Granny Marrable went on to repeat how a "boomer," chased by the
dogs, had made straight for her sister's husband, whose gun, missing
fire, had killed his best dog; while the quarry, unterrified by the
report, sprang at a bound over his head and got away scathless. This,
and other incidents of the convict's after-life in Van Diemen's Land,
told without leading to the crime of the forged letter, had shown how
completely separate in Maisie's mind were the memories of her not
unhappy life with her husband in the past, and that of the recent
revelation of his iniquity. She somehow dissociated the two images of
him, and her mind could dwell easily on _his_ identity as it had
appeared to her during her thirty years of widowhood, without losing the
new-found consciousness of Phoebe's.

But Granny Marrable had taken special note of the fact that her sister
never referred to the son who had come with her from Australia, and had
herself been scrupulously careful not to do so. She did not really know
whether Maisie was alive to the possibility of his reappearance at any
moment; and, indeed, could not have said positively whether allusio