couldn't make up her mind till the last moment to leave him, and that,
a mile or two along the road, she'd have turned back for him, only that
she knew her sister would laugh at her. She was always terribly anxious
about the children.

We cheered each other up, and Mary drove with me the rest of the way
to the creek, along the lonely branch track, across native-apple-tree
flats. It was a dreary, hopeless track. There was no horizon, nothing
but the rough ashen trunks of the gnarled and stunted trees in all
directions, little or no undergrowth, and the ground, save for the
coarse, brownish tufts of dead grass, as bare as the road, for it was
a dry season: there had been no rain for months, and I wondered what I
should do with the cattle if there wasn't more grass on the creek.

In this sort of country a stranger might travel for miles without
seeming to have moved, for all the difference there is in the scenery.
The new tracks were 'blazed'--that is, slices of bark cut off from both
sides of trees, within sight of each other, in a line, to mark the track
until the horses and wheel-marks made it plain. A smart Bushman, with
a sharp tomahawk, can blaze a track as he rides. But a Bushman a little
used to the country soon picks out differences amongst the trees, half
unconsciously as it were, and so finds his way about.

Mary and I didn't talk much along this track--we couldn't have heard
each other very well, anyway, for the 'clock-clock' of the waggon and
the rattle of the cart over the hard lumpy ground. And I suppose we
both began to feel pretty dismal as the shadows lengthened. I'd noticed
lately that Mary and I had got out of the habit of talking to each
other--noticed it in a vague sort of way that irritated me (as vague
things will irritate one) when I thought of it. But then I thought, 'It
won't last long--I'll make life brighter for her by-and-by.'

As we went along--and the track seemed endless--I got brooding, of
course, back into the past. And I feel now, when it's too late, that
Mary must have been thinking that way too. I thought of my early
boyhood, of the hard life of 'grubbin'' and 'milkin'' and 'fencin'' and
'ploughin'' and 'ring-barkin'', &c., and all for nothing. The few months
at the little bark-school, with a teacher who couldn't spell. The cursed
ambition or craving that tortured my soul as a boy--ambition or craving
for--I didn't know what for! For something better and brighter, anyhow.
And I mad