“What is it?” she interrupted, pointing to the food imperiously.

“It’s about a girl and a boy living on a desert island, and she has a baby without turning a hair.  Remembering my nerve-racking experience of maternity in the Borough I thought Stacpoole was rather talking without his book.  But when I saw this Maori I felt like sending him my humble apologies by wireless.  The tribe was trekking.  I was with them for months, you know, in the Prohibition Country.  My diagnostic eye had foreseen a birthday and, as a matter of fact, I was getting rather funky and wishing I had Hermann’s ‘Midwifery’ to swot up.  I saw myself the hero of the occasion, don’t you know, dashing in to save her life, miles from civilization.  One morning we were camping by a hot spring for the women to do some cooking and washing.  My patient disappeared with an old thing we called Aunt Maggie.  Presently we trekked again, and I was feeling horribly uneasy about her, when I nearly dropped.  There she was, sailing along in the midst of the other women, with the kid in her arms, looking as cool as a cucumber!  Lord, I did feel small!”

He laughed reminiscently, and lighted his pipe.

“It seems right to me,” she said, looking away through the drifting smoke.  “Why should the coming of life mean pain for someone?”

“Don’t know, old lady.  But it does.  I say, how do you think I’m getting on?”

They looked across the clearing and felt rather proud.

“I love it,” he said simply, “taking nature in hand a bit—­she’s a wicked old harridan, isn’t she?  A naughty old lady gone wrong!  Look at that gorse!  We’ll have spuds here in no time, and then, in a few years, wheat.  I feel I’m making a dint on the face of the earth at last.  In a hundred year’s time, when I’m forgotten, the effect of these few months’ work will be felt.  I say, am I talking hot air?”

“Not a bit.  But let’s do a bit more—­Jerry calls it scene-shifting.”

She tossed the last piece of cake to an inquisitive kookaburra who had been watching the meal optimistically, with bright eyes and nodding head.  It was a triumph, this cake—­in several ways.  The stationmaster at Cook’s Wall had built his “bosker hotel” at last, and had made it a store at which one could buy fruit, jam, sugar and various luxuries.  Louis had been in twice to the store lately, and had actually remembered the seed-cake on the Oriana when he saw caraway seeds in the store.  He volunteered the information that there was whisky for sale at the store, but did not mention whether he had wanted to buy it or not.

He got up, taking the mattock.  Marcella began to fight a great stem running along the ground.

“Devilish stuff,” he said, turning back to look at her.  “See that little patch over there?”

She nodded, following his eyes.  A brisk little gorse bush was bursting from the ground.  A few feet away another was keeping it company.