e the life harder by reading at night.

It all passed before me as I followed on in the waggon, behind Mary in
the spring-cart. I thought of these old things more than I thought of
her. She had tried to help me to better things. And I tried too--I had
the energy of half-a-dozen men when I saw a road clear before me,
but shied at the first check. Then I brooded, or dreamed of making a
home--that one might call a home--for Mary--some day. Ah, well!----

And what was Mary thinking about, along the lonely, changeless miles? I
never thought of that. Of her kind, careless, gentleman father, perhaps.
Of her girlhood. Of her homes--not the huts and camps she lived in with
me. Of our future?--she used to plan a lot, and talk a good deal of our
future--but not lately. These things didn't strike me at the time--I was
so deep in my own brooding. Did she think now--did she begin to feel
now that she had made a great mistake and thrown away her life, but must
make the best of it? This might have roused me, had I thought of it. But
whenever I thought Mary was getting indifferent towards me, I'd think,
'I'll soon win her back. We'll be sweethearts again--when things
brighten up a bit.'

It's an awful thing to me, now I look back to it, to think how far apart
we had grown, what strangers we were to each other. It seems, now, as
though we had been sweethearts long years before, and had parted, and
had never really met since.

The sun was going down when Mary called out--

'There's our place, Joe!'

She hadn't seen it before, and somehow it came new and with a shock to
me, who had been out here several times. Ahead, through the trees to
the right, was a dark green clump of the oaks standing out of the creek,
darker for the dead grey grass and blue-grey bush on the barren ridge in
the background. Across the creek (it was only a deep, narrow gutter--a
water-course with a chain of water-holes after rain), across on the
other bank, stood the hut, on a narrow flat between the spur and the
creek, and a little higher than this side. The land was much better than
on our old selection, and there was good soil along the creek on both
sides: I expected a rush of selectors out here soon. A few acres round
the hut was cleared and fenced in by a light two-rail fence of timber
split from logs and saplings. The man who took up this selection left it
because his wife died here.

It was a small oblong hut built of split slabs, and he had roofed it