“MY OWN DARLING,

“Wasn’t it a sell?  That damned captain’s had a down on me all the trip.  I reported him to the shipping company and I’m trying to get a free pass from them by rail.  Otherwise I should come by the train that has brought this letter.  By great luck I ran into an old girl I knew in New Zealand.  She’s a nurse who saved my life once when I was in hospital there.  She’s a dear—­Oh quite old; don’t get jealous, my pet!  I’m staying the night at an hotel in Little Collins Street.  The landlord has lent me a fiver, so don’t worry about me.  One thing I’ve to tell you—­a terrible confession.  I lost your father’s ring in my haste the other night, but never mind.  I’ll buy you another.  I hope your Uncle stumped up.  Australia’s a damnable place to be hard up in.  Will you tip my stewards for me and see my things through the Customs?  Give Knollys and the other chap ten shillings each.  They haven’t killed themselves on my behalf, or it would have been a quid.  Tell them I sent it.  I don’t want them to know I’m hard up.  If I hit up that railway pass I should be through before lunch on Saturday.  And then, old girl, there’ll be doings!  I hear you can get hitched up in Sydney for about twenty-seven bob, without waiting for notices of any sort.  Till then, all my love and all my thoughts are for you.

“Your own Louis.

“P.S. (Just like a woman) You’d better get something decent and not Scotch to wear if your uncle came down decently.  And book us rooms at the Hotel Australia.  They do you very well there.”

It was her first love letter.  She felt, vaguely, that it lacked something though she did not quite know what.  She hated the talk about money and about her uncle.  She hated that he could borrow money so casually from a nurse who had been good to him.  She wished that terrible hunger he had predicted had not happened to her.  She knew, with absolute certainty, that Dr. Angus had gauged her fatal habit of conceited anxiety to help other people when he cabled to her not to marry a drunkard whom she had merely put to him as a hypothetical case.  And she knew the doctor was inevitably right about the folly of marrying a man like Louis.

“But he’s wrong about there being no cure.  When he is with me every minute and I can look after him as if he is my little baby, he won’t be able to do it.  I’ll be a gaoler to him—­I’ll be his providence, his mother, his nurse, his doctor.  Oh everything—­I’ll be what God was to father.”

Down on Circular Quay she felt she could not go aboard the Oriana yet.  In spite of the unsteadiness of her feet it was very pleasant to be walking about in a new land, so, taking out Louis’s letter again she went on rather blindly through the wharves, reading it.  A Japanese boat was loading; smells of garlic and of spice and sandalwood were wafted to her from the holds and weaved into her thoughts of Louis; a little further along there was a crowd of