Still he did not tackle Mary. For sometimes, after all, a disturbed
doubt crept upon him whether it would not be possible to go on as he
was; instead of, as she would drastically word it, cutting his throat
with his own hand. And to be perfectly honest, he believed it would. He
could now afford to pay for help in his work; to buy what books he
needed or fancied; to take holidays while putting in a LOCUM; even to
keep on the LOCUM, at a good salary, while he journeyed overseas to
visit the land of his birth. But at this another side of him--what he
thought of as spirit, in contradistinction to soul--cried out in alarm,
fearful lest it was again to be betrayed. Thus far, though by rights
coequal in the house of the body, it had been rigidly kept down.
Nevertheless it had persisted, like a bright cold little spark at dead
of night: his restlessness, the spiritual malaise that encumbered him
had been its mute form of protest. Did he go on turning a deaf ear to
its warnings, he might do himself irreparable harm. For time was
flying, the sum of his years mounting, shrinking that roomy future to
which he had thus far always postponed what seemed too difficult for
the moment. Now he saw that he dared delay no longer in setting free
the imprisoned elements in him, was he ever to grow to that complete
whole which each mortal aspires to be.--That a change of environment
would work this miracle he did not doubt; a congenial environment was
meat and drink to him, was light and air. Here in this country, he had
remained as utterly alien as any Jew of old who wept by the rivers of
Babylon. And like a half-remembered tune there came floating into his
mind words he had lit on somewhere, or learnt on the
school-bench--Horace, he thought, but, whatever their source, words
that fitted his case to a nicety. COELUM, NON ANIMUM, MUTANT, QUI TRANS
MARE CURRUNT. "Non animum"? Ah! could he but have foreseen
this--foreknown it. If not before he set sail on what was to have been
but a swift adventure, then at least on that fateful day long past
when, foiled by Mary's pleadings and his own inertia, he had let
himself be bound anew.

Thus the summer dragged by; a summer to try the toughest. Mahony
thought he had never gone through its like for heat and discomfort. The
drought would not break, and on the great squatting-stations round
Ballarat and to the north, the sheep dropped like flies at an early
frost. The forest reservoirs dried up, displayi