“Yet he killed himself with drink.”

“Yes.  I guess he didn’t mean me to kill myself with any desire at all!  Fancy being tyrannized over by a bit of paper and tobacco!  Can’t you get a picture of it?  A nice, big man like you and a cigarette standing there with a grin on its face, like a savage god, making you bow down and worship it!  Horrible!  Didn’t the Lord know all about you when he made that commandment about graven images!”

“Oh, you’re inhuman—­and you’re a prig!  You’re a block of marble.  You think because you’ve never wanted anything in your life no one else has.”

“I like marble,” she said with a laugh.  “Something solid and substantial about it.  You can always be sure about it.”

She went back to her book, but she was not reading.  Presently she saw him raking about among a sheaf of waratahs with which she had hidden the ugly old grate.  He looked up exultantly.

“Six cigarette ends!  That’s enough to make three if I roll them thin.  Lord be thanked I’ve some cigarette papers.”

There was something so pathetic about this that she forgot to feel contemptuous about it.  Before another hour had gone he had smoked the three resurrected cigarettes as well as the last remaining new one.  She made more tea.  It was five o’clock, the hour when all the sun’s heat in Australia seems to gather itself together and pour downwards, drawing up the earth heat to meet it.  Louis looked fagged and worn.  She re-dipped sheets in cold water and hung them up to cool the room a little; her hair was damp, the atmosphere of the room quite motionless.

“Do you think I could smoke tea?” said he, plaintively.  “I believe people do sometimes.”

He took the tea from the caddy, rubbed a little in his palm and made a cigarette with it.  It drew with difficulty; after the first bitter whiff he threw it away impatiently and sat on the edge of the bed, his face buried in his hands.

She dashed out of the room and went down to the dining-room.  Four of the “young chaps” were playing their interminable game of cards at the table.  A three months’ old niece of Mrs. King, whose mother was sitting with her sister in the bedroom talking, lay in a dressbasket on the table being guarded by the men.

She blinked knowingly at Marcella, who bent over her.  Two men lay asleep on chairs, one on the couch.  They were all in various stages of undress, and had towels round their necks with which they mopped their damp foreheads.  They looked up and greeted her as she came in.

“Have a game, ma?” asked Dutch Frank.

“No, thank you.  I’ve come to beg, borrow or steal.  Can someone lend or give me a few cigarettes?  My poor man has run short.  It’s too hot to go out.  At least, I’m going to stay in.”

They all had any amount of cigarettes; the piles of ends in the hearth made her think contemptuously of Louis scrabbling in the dust for them.  Next minute she was sorry for her unkindness.  The boys each pressed a packet of ten upon her; when she tried to choose between them they insisted that they would be jealous unless she took them all.  Louis’s face, when he saw forty cigarettes in her hand, disgusted her.  It was like the pigs in the sty at feeding time—­squealing—­jostling.