Meg was sitting in a little heap on the floor beside her.  She had never moved her eyes from the face on the pillow of mackintoshes, she had never opened her white lips to say one word.

Outside the bullocks stood motionless against the sky—­Judy said they looked like stuffed ones having their portrait taken.  She smiled the least little bit, but Meg said, “Don’t,” and writhed.

Two of the men had gone on superfluous errands for help; the others stood some distance away, talking in subdued voices.

There was nothing for them to do.  The brown man had been talking—­ a rare thing for him.

He had soothed the General off to sleep, and laid him in the bunk with the blue blanket tucked around him.  And he had made a billy of hot strong tea, and asked the children, with tears in his eyes, to drink some, but none of them would.

Baby had fallen to sleep on the floor, her arms clasped tightly around Judy’s lace-up boot.

Runty was standing, with a stunned look on his white face, behind the stretcher.  His eyes were on his sister’s hair, but he did not dare to let there wander to her face, for fear of what he should see there.  Nellie was moving all the time—­now to the fence to strain her eyes down the road, where the evening shadows lay heavily, now to fling herself face downward behind the hut and say, “Make her better, God!  God, make her better, make her better!  Oh!  Can’t You make her better?”

Greyer grew the shadows round the little but, the bullocks’ outlines had faded, and only an indistinct mass of soft black loomed across the light.  Behind the trees the fire was going out, here and there were yellow, vivid streaks yet, but the flaming sun-edge, had dipped beyond the world, and the purple, delicate veil was dropping down.

A curlew’s note broke the silence, wild, mournful, unearthly.  Meg shivered, and sat up straight.  Judy’s brow, grew damp, her eyes dilated, her lips trembled.

“Meg!” she said, in a whisper that cut the air.  “Oh, Meg, I’m frightened!  Meg, I’m so frightened!”

“God!” said Meg’s heart.

“Meg, say something.  Meg, help me!  Look at the dark, Meg.  Meg, I can’t die!  Oh, why don’t they be quick?”

Nellie flew to the fence again; then to say, “Make her better, God—­oh, please, God!”

“Meg, I can’t think of anything to say.  Can’t you say something, Meg?  Aren’t there any prayers about the dying in the Prayer Book?—­ I forget.  Say something, Meg!”

Meg’s lips moved, but her tongue uttered no word.

“Meg, I’m so frightened!  I can’t think of anything but `For what we are about to receive,’ and that’s grace, isn’t it?  And there’s nothing in Our Father that would do either.  Meg, I wish we’d gone to Sunday-school and learnt things.  Look at the dark, Meg!  Oh, Meg, hold my hands!”

“Heaven won’t—­be—­dark,” Meg’s lips said.  Even when speech came, it was only a halting, stereotyped phrase that fell from them.