Martin told me to-day that he had given up the idea of leaving me at Wellington and had determined to take me on to Winter Quarters, having met, on the way to Windsor, some great specialist in my kind of malady (I wonder how much he knows of it), who declared that the climate of the Antarctic would act on me like magic.

Such glorious sunshine in summer!  Such crisp, dry, stimulating air!  New life with every breath!  Such a stunning little house, too, so cosy and comfortable!  And then the men whom he would leave behind while he slipped down South—­they would worship me!

“How splendid!  How glorious!” I cried.  “How delightful to be mistress over a houseful of big, hungry, healthy boys, who come in out of the snow and want to eat up everything!”

Sometimes I feel myself being carried away by my own acting, and then I see the others (Christian Ann and the old doctor and Father Dan) dropping their heads or stealing out of the room.

I wish I were not so weak.  I feel no pain whatever.  Only this temperature during the nights and the ever-deepening exhaustion in the mornings.

* * * * *

JULY 16.  I am keeping it up!  To-day I was alone with Martin for a long hour in the garden-house.  Weather soft and beautiful, the heavens blue, and gleams of sunshine coming through the trellis-work.

Merely to sit beside my darling with his odour of health is to feel a flood of bodily strength coursing through me, enough to make me forget that I am a frail thing myself, who could be blown away by a puff of wind.  But to hear him talk on his own subject is to be lifted up to the highest reaches of the soul.

I always say there is a dumb poet in every explorer; but the poet wasn’t dumb to-day when Martin talked about the cyclone or anticyclone, or whatever it is which covers the region of the South Pole like a cap, and determines the weather of a great part of the habitable globe.

“We are going to take from God his word and pass it on to the world,” he said.

After that he made reference (for the first time since his return) to the difficulties of our position, saying what a glorious thing it would be to escape to that great free region from the world of civilisation, with its effete laws and worn-out creeds which enslave humanity.

“Only a month to-day until we start, and you’ll be well enough to travel then, dearest.”

“Yes, yes, only a month to-day, and I shall be well enough then, dearest.”

Oh, Mary O’Neill!  How much longer will you be able to keep it up, dear?

* * * * *

JULY 17.  Martin brought the proofs of his new book from London, and to-day in the summer-house (bluebells paling out and hanging their heads, but the air full of the odour of fruit trees) he and Dr. O’Sullivan and I have been correcting “galleys”—­the doctor reading aloud, Martin smoking his briar-root pipe, and I (in a crater of cushions) supposed to be sitting as judge and jury.