His eyes moved to her face again, and he tried to nod, but found that that was too much trouble too.  It was too much trouble to pretend to understand even.  Aurora would hold him and prevent his floating out into the fantastical, fairy atmosphere.  It seemed right and natural that she should be there.  He had quite expected it.  But had he?  The train of thought was too laborious:  he abandoned it.  Joy gave him something to drink.  She poured it into his mouth, and it ran down his throat.  It was good, wonderfully good—­nectar, surely.  Had he been told it was water he would have resented the lie with as much energy as he was capable of putting into any thought, and that was just the thin, silken line, next to none at all.  As a matter of fact, Joy had given him nothing but water.  It seemed to add to his weight, to give some little quality of substance to his being.  He thought he might thank her with a pressure of his fingers presently, but the necessary power did not come, and he drifted into sleep.

XX

The Christmas of 1854 was the gayest ever known at Boobyalla; never had Mrs. Donald Macdougal been so prodigal, never had such lavish hospitality been dispensed under Macdougal’s roof-tree, and the squatter wore a dour and anxious look as he saw the liquor flowing, and heard the music, and the laughter, and the clatter of dishes, and found himself in collision with his wife’s guests in all the passages and windings of his large, wandering homestead.  Macdougal, who, in addition to his sobriquet of Monkey Mack, was known as Old Dint-the-Tin by the sundowners, shearers, and miscellaneous swagmen to whom he sold pints of flour out of a pannikin dinted in to shorten the measure, was not miserly in his dealings with his wife and his children.  He was reputed to be mean enough to steal the buttons off a shepherd’s shirt for his own use, and yet permitted his wife to indulge in all the extravagances of purple and fine linen, and paid, if not cheerfully—­for it was not in his nature to be cheerful over anything—­at least without open complaint, for social indulgences that ate up a large part of the results of his miraculous economies in station management, and a sedulous penuriousness in everything beyond his wife, his children, and his few favourite horses.

But on this occasion Mrs. Macdougal had outdone herself, and had exceeded all her previous efforts to shine as a generous hostess.  Her aim had been to make Boobyalla the centre of attraction for thirty miles round throughout the merry Yuletide, and for nearly two weeks Donald had gone about with an air of lively trepidation, due to an idea that he was being brought precipitately to ruin by all this wasteful and ridiculous excess.  When Mrs. Macdougal’s guests came upon her lord and master laboriously casting up sums with a stab of carpenter’s pencil on bits of waste-paper, or smooth chips, or even on the walls, they understood perfectly that he was satisfying himself, with accurate calculations, that the shameful increase in the household expenses their presence entailed had not dragged him over the jealously guarded margin between income and expenditure.