'It's you—it's really you. You're not dead, are you?'
'Dead! Oh no—no.... I've come home.'
'Home!' He laughed.
'Oh don't—don't,' she cried. 'Don't laugh like that.'
'Home!' he repeated, grimly. 'Look round you. A nice sort of home. Eh?'
'I don't care. It's the only real home I've ever had.'
'But look—look!'
She followed his eyes to the great pyre in the garden, with the dead leaves, and the pieces of furniture, the squatters' chairs, the little tables he and she had covered together, the hammock that he had cut down leaving the ropes dangling—many other things that she recognised also. Then her gaze came back to the veranda. To the open portmanteaux; the different objects still strewing the ground; and then to the shelf-table against the wall near the hammock, and, there, to his most cherished possessions. She knew at once his mother's work-box, the shabby SHAKESPEARE—the portraits, and, on top of all, the piece of gum-tree bark.
She snatched her wrists from his grasp, darted to the shelf, seized the shrivelled pice of bark, and pressed it against her bosom as though it had been a living thing.
'Oh, you COULDN'T burn this! ... You were going to burn it with the rest—but you COULDN'T—any more than you could have burned your mother's things.... I thought of it all the way—I knew that if you could burn this, too, there would be no hope for me any more. I PRAYED that you might not burn it.'