'I couldn't, I couldn't,' she said; 'the danger made my heart grow sick again. See, for I must be brutal, the time has come for it. I love your ways, your dreams; no canvas you have touched, no song, no verses but I have loved. But what have they done for us, what have they done?'
The man's eyes, startled, followed her tragic finger that swept a circle. Outside he saw the sun-baked, weary little town that must see their days and years, inside the cramped room full of boxes that were disgorging a pitiful array of shabby clothes and broken furniture; just at hand his wife, the woman he had taken to him, fresh and beautiful, to crown his tenderest dream and turned into this thin, careworn, anxious-eyed creature.
His face whitened. 'It is worse than drink!' he said.
She acquiesced sadly.
'Nothing else would make me take it from you,' she said, her wet eyes falling again to the paint-box; 'and if it were you and I only against the world, you should have it all your days. But five children to get ready for the world! Jim, my heart fails me!'
He was trembling too. It was the first time he had felt a sense of genuine responsibility for his tribe since the time Hermie was put into his arms, a babe three hours old. Then he had rushed away to insure his life for five hundred pounds. He forgot, of course, to keep up the policy after the second month. Now his heart felt the weight of the whole five, Hermie, Bartie and Challis, Roly and little Floss.
He gave his wife a passionate kiss.
'You are right,' he said, 'take it; I give it all up for ever, and begin from now to be a man.'
Time went past, and the criss-cross lines on the mother's brow were fading, and the anxious outlook of the eyes seemed gone. She called up a home around her where before had only been a house; the children were taught; she even, by dint of hard economy, made it possible to send to Sydney for the piano they had left as security for a debt.
The friends in Sydney, two years gone by, began indeed to congratulate themselves that Wilgandra had swallowed up for all time that troublesome yet well-liked fellow Cameron, and his terrible family.