“Oh, I could shake you!” she cried.  “You know quite well I’m not going to leave you, if we have to live on eleven shillings for the rest of our lives.  It isn’t eleven shillings now, either.  I gave Jimmy half a crown to spend at Colombo.”

“Fool,” he muttered gloomily.

“Who spent fifteen pounds?” she retorted.

“I say, I’m sorry, old girl, but my nerves are a bundle of rags!  I’ve never had a wife to worry about before—­and I can’t see how I’m going to make enough money to make her my wife yet—­”

Marcella knew nothing whatever about money.  She had a few jewels of her mother, but it did not occur to her that they were worth money.  Louis had absolutely nothing of value.  Guided by past experience his mother had given him the barest necessities for clothes; his watch and most of his clothes he had sold before he sailed.  What made him so irritable with Marcella was the knowledge that he could easily get the money by being drunk.  Publicans are proverbially open-handed; most publicans would have lent him ten pounds to spend in their establishment if he had thoroughly and courageously drunk and pitched some tale about expecting money by the English mail.  He certainly looked worth ten pounds and his father’s name as a publisher was fairly well known even in the Colonies.  He had frequently “raised” twenty or thirty pounds in this way in New Zealand.  Once or twice he had borrowed a few pounds from a doctor by telling him a pitiful tale, but most doctors recognized his symptoms and refused to help him to hurt himself.

Suddenly Marcella gave a little giggle of sheer amusement.

“I don’t see much to laugh at,” he growled.

“I’m thinking of how worried you were about my dignity as your wife and afraid I’d disgrace you in hotels by being friendly with the servants,” she said.  “It doesn’t look as if we’re going to get a tent even.”

He read unkindness into her chaffing words and flushed hotly.

Suddenly his silly pride that had lain asleep, for the most part, since Port Said, gave a little struggle and came to wakefulness again.  He could not have her laugh at him however good-naturedly.  Just as he had not realized he was lying to her when he told her highly coloured versions of his surgical exploits, so he scarcely realized he was lying, as he said, mysteriously: 

“Don’t be too sure, my child.  You won’t be laughing at me soon.  I may be a bit of a waster, but I’m not the sort to marry a girl without knowing how I’m going to support her.  How do you know you won’t be the guest of the Governor-General as soon as he knows I’m in Sydney—­”

“Whatever do you mean?  Oh, Louis, don’t tell me stories!  And I don’t want to go and see people like Governor-Generals.  I want to be alone with you.”

“You probably will, my dear girl.  But you must remember that a secret service man has to cover up his traces in every way.  He has to hide everything, even from his wife.”