"Donald," she turned to him. "I promised not to send anyone after them. You know, and I know, that lots of men have been sent out for things that were not crimes at all, and—"
"You know and you will not tell me?" he asked harshly, as though he had not heard.
"Yes," she cried.
He took her by the shoulder. His arm trembled.
"I have stood this sort of thing long enough," he said. "On the ship and in Melbourne it was the same. You were always doing such things, feeding, or giving your clothes to filthy, ailing gaol-birds and whiners. I have told you, you could not afford to do it. No respectable woman can afford to, in a country where every second woman has the prison mark on her. Show sympathy with lags, and what'll be said next? You're a lag yourself and that's why your sympathy's with them. Y're my wife, the wife of a decent man and free settler, I'd have y'r remember that, and I'll not have it said of you!"
He threw her off from him.
"Which way did they go?"
Keen and compelling, the deep-set eyes, those in-dwelling places of his will, met hers.
"It was my word I gave, Donald," his wife said, "and I can't tell you."