Of course, I shall see you sometimes--and my boy; but for a home--all
the home I can want or wish for now--that is my dream."

"I don't think," said Deb, "that I ever heard human ambition--and
happiness--expressed in such terms before." It was the final result of
Mary's experiment in the business of a woman's life.

Deb drove back to her hotel, thoughtful and sad and tired. When Rosalie
had left her for the night, she wrote to Claud by way of comforting
herself. She told him what she had been doing--described her interviews
with Rose and Mary respectively, and the impressions they had left on
her.

"Of all the four of us," she concluded her letter, "I am the only one
who has been fortunate in love. I found my mate in the beginning,
before there was time to make mistakes--the right man, whom I could
love in the right way--and we have been kept for each other through all
these years, although for a long time we did not know it. And now we
are together--or shall be in a few days--never to part again. It is the
only love-story in the family--I don't except Rose's, because I don't
call that a love-story--which has had a happy ending."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Down the middle of the big T-shaped wool-shed, in two rows of six pens
each, with an aisle between them, the bleating sheep were massed. They
had been driven into that aisle and thus distributed, as a crowd of
soldiers might be packed into their pews at church, and twelve little
gates had then been shut upon them. Each gate had a corresponding one
at the opposite end of the pen, opening upon a broad lane of floor, and
facing a doorway into outside pens and the sunny paddocks of the
background. Between gate and door, on his own section of the boarded
lane, a sweating, bare-armed man with shears performed prodigies of
strength and skill. Every few minutes he snatched a heavy sheep from
the pen beside him, flung it with a round turn into a sitting posture
between his knees, and with the calm indifference to its violent
objections of the spider to those of the fly that he makes into a
parcel, sliced off its coat like a cook peeling a potato. The fleece
gently fell upon the floor, as you may see an unnoticed shawl slip from
an old lady's shoulders, and before it could realise what had happened,
the poor naked animal found itself shot through the doorway, to stagger
headlong down the sloping stage that was its returning path to freedom.
Twelve of these stalwart and str