It had not been a happy home altogether and yet, and yet—­it was better than this.  There was pure air there, at least, and grass up to the door, and trees rustling over-head; and the little children were brown and sturdy and played with merry shouts, not with these vile words she heard jabbered in the wretched street.  Her heart grew sick within her—­a habit it had, that heart of Nellie’s—­and a passion of wild revolt against her surroundings made her bite her lips and press her nails against her palms.  She looked across at the group opposite.  More children being born!  Week in and week out they seemed to come in spite of all the talk of not having any more.  She could have cried over this holocaust of the innocents, and yet she shrank with an unreasoning shrinking from the barrenness that was coming to be regarded as the most comfortable state and being sought after, as she knew well, by the younger married women.  What were they all coming to?  Were they all to go on like this without a struggle until they vanished altogether as a people, perhaps to make room for the round-cheeked, bland-faced Chinaman who stood in the doorway of his shop in the crossing thorough-fare, gazing expressionlessly at her?  She loathed that Chinaman.  He always seemed to be watching her, to be waiting for something.  She would dream of him sometimes as creeping upon her from behind, always with that bland round face.  Yet he never spoke to her, never insulted her, only he seemed to be always watching her, always waiting.  And it would come to her sometimes like a cold chill, that this yellow man and such men as he were watching them all slowly going down lower and lower, were waiting to leap upon them in their last helplessness and enslave them all as white girls were sometimes enslaved, even already, in those filthy opium joints whose stench nauseated the hurrying passers-by.  Perhaps under all their meekness these Chinese were braver, more stubborn, more vigorous, and it was doomed that they should conquer at last and rule in the land where they had been treated as outcasts and intruders.  She thought of this—­and, just then, Ned turned the corner by the lamp.

Ned was a Down’s native, every inch of him.  He stood five feet eleven in his bare feet yet was so broad and strong that he hardly looked over the medium height.  He had blue eyes and a heavy moustache just tinged with red.  His hair was close-cut and dark; his forehead, nose and chin wore large and strong; his lips were strangely like a woman’s.  He walked with short jerky steps, swinging himself awkwardly as men do who have been much in the saddle.  He wore a white shirt, as being holiday-making, but had not managed a collar; his pants were dark-blue, slightly belled; his coat, dark-brown; his boots wore highly polished; round his neck was a silk handkerchief; round his vestless waist, a discoloured leather belt; above all, a wide-brimmed cabbage tree hat, encircled by a narrow leather strap.  He swung himself along