During those three days Marcella deliberately left her work; she went to the Homestead in the mornings, and fired some gorse in the afternoons; dense clouds of smoke rose into the windless air.  For the rest she made Kraill talk, listening to him with an air of sitting at his feet.  She felt more despairing than ever.  Kraill seemed to share her pity for Louis and she, feeling in a way that Jove had spoken from the thunders and the earth had not trembled, was dulled and dead.  She knew that he would go back to Sydney soon; she wondered how she would bear her aching loneliness, her bankruptcy of spirit when he was gone.

The night Louis came back was even more dreadful than ever.  His talk with Kraill had made him bitterly jealous.  It hurt him like a wound to see an Englishman there, and an Englishman who could come and go about the world as he liked, unchained.  Like Kraill he had tossed up for his chance that morning he went to Klondyke—­whether to finish the whole miserable business in the lake and leave Marcella and the boy to go their way to England in peace, or whether to get drunk as usual.  And tails had won.  Cussedly he paid the cost.

And that night, sore and aching at heart, longing beneath the whisky madness to sob out all his penitence and misery into her ear, with her hair over his face, her arms around him, he raved at her all the foul things he could think, in sheer self-excuse.  She had been to bed for hours.  It was about two o’clock when he came home and, afraid that he should waken Kraill, she led him away from the house until he was quietened by her sudden turning on him and shaking him until he could not find his breath for awhile.  That always sobered him; her kisses and caresses and forgiveness soothed him to sleep afterwards.

The next morning Kraill said that he must go to Sydney.  He bade her good-bye and went without a word of kindliness, of hope.  Louis took him to Cook’s Wall.  When he came back he said nothing in answer to all Marcella’s enquiries about what they had said on the long drive.  Louis went back to the gorse-grubbing and worked feverishly for almost a month, as he always did after being drunk.  And it seemed as though Kraill had never been except that in all the little things that used to be a joy she now could find no joy at all.  The shine had gone from her golden flowers, the softness from the wind rustling in the scrub, which now was an irritating crepitus; there was no music in Andrew’s laugh, no ecstasy in the words he was learning every day, words that, at first, she had written proudly on a sheet of paper to send to his grandmother.  The gentleness seemed to have gone even from Mrs. Twist’s kindly face, and the negative peace of three moneyless weeks to come brought no healing.  She felt that she would welcome strife.