She turned back through the streets that were so extraordinarily like London in spite of Chinese, German and Italian names.  As she passed the Post Office for the second time it occurred to her that there might be letters for her there, and found quite a bundle of them in a little pigeonhole high up.  There was also a cablegram that had been waiting two days.  She opened that first.  It was extravagantly long; the name “Carlossie” at the head of it gave her a sickening pang of homesickness for a moment.  She read: 

“Letter from Port Said arrived.  Very anxious.  Only way you treat drunkard is leave him alone.  Impossible cure.  Above all do not marry him or shall blame myself.  Writing.  Await letter I implore you.—­Angus.”

It was extraordinary extravagance for Dr. Angus.  She felt guilty at having worried him.

“But I never mentioned marrying Louis!  I simply said he was one of the passengers I was interested in.”

There was a letter from Aunt Janet written after the Oriana had sailed and sent overland to Marseilles.

“I certainly miss you,” she wrote, “but I shall get over it in time, I expect.  One gets very used to everything in time.  I wonder if you will ever come back?  I expect so.  Wullie the Hunchback came along with fish for me twice.  He misses you badly.  You were always a great deal with him.”

Letters from Mrs. Mactavish and from Wullie, dictated to and written by Bessie, said that she would be back soon; standing under the portico of the Post Office, surrounded by the flower sellers with their bunches of exuberant waratah, feathery wattle and sweet, sober-looking boronia, she let her mind travel back to Lashnagar and the acrid smoke of the green-wood fires, the pungency of the fish, the sharp tang of the salt winds pushed the heavy perfume of flowers aside.  In a moment the last six weeks of mad, unhappy dreaming and hoping vanished; she saw herself back again in her own sphere among her own people.  She tried to picture Louis there, too, and realized horribly that he would never fit into the picture.  Against Wullie and the doctor and her aunt he would look so vulgar, so pretentious, so tinsel-coloured.  And how they would laugh at a man who could not master himself, a man who cried!

“Why, I’m a snob!  I was hurt when he thought I’d disgrace him by my bad manners.  And now I’m being just as cruel!”

Then she jerked herself away from Lashnagar and stood with the last letter in her hand, afraid to open it.  It was postmarked Melbourne and had come in that morning.  It was in Louis’s writing, and gave her an acute sense of distress.  She stood still by a shop window, looking into it blindly until she realized that she was looking at a crocodile and some snakes squirming about in tanks in a naturalist’s window.  The straggly writing reminded her of the ugly snakes:  it told her that he was drunk more or less when the letter was written; she looked from the letter to the snakes.  One of them crawled writhingly over the others, lifted its head and put out its tongue at her:  shivering, she opened the letter.