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face seaward. Unfortunately the voyage was a dreary time, for the strain of the past weeks suddenly told—Pamela collapsed with a feverish chill and spent long days and half-delirious nights in her cabin, haunted by the terrors she had escaped, with no friend but a comparative stranger in all her lonely world. Yet, dreadful though the voyage had proved to be, she almost wished it might be prolonged indefinitely. She was so tired, that it was easy to lie still and let life flow past her; but once they landed in Brisbane action would be required of her, and all her energy and courage seemed to have ebbed away. Australia loomed terribly rather than beautifully remote, and the vague idea that Tony might be still there she dismissed now as absurd. As a matter of fact, already the daily papers were reporting his death, but daily papers did not exist for Pamela, and when she thought of him she pictured him in London, or on his way there.

He was nearer than she dreamed, having left Tanami with a party that went round by sea, via Port Darwin. He wrote briefly to Alison from that interesting town before continuing his voyage to Brisbane. He felt languid, an extraordinary condition for Tony. The illness had left its mark on him, and the moist, stifling February weather gave no chance of his regaining tone. At Thursday Island it was raining heavily; he did not land. That wet, green jewel was one of the vividest places in the world to him. The other was a Philadelphia drawing-room in the half-dusk. He had no desire to see either again; he fervidly hoped that by the time he visited the Straines again they would have got into their long-talked-of new house. As the little schooner sagged down the inside of the Barrier Reef the ache of restlessness crept into Tony’s sick bones again. He wanted to work—to work! And he needed it too, there was no more money now that his passage was paid.