no notion for him to come in and corner us if that's your game."

"He's away," she replied, "and will not be back—perhaps for a day or two."

He stared at her.

"I should never have thought Davey would be so good with a stranger," she added, her eyes travelling from Davey's round head on his arm to the man's dark face, and the eyes that leapt and glittered in it. She smiled into them.

Davey was crooning and gurgling. He had crooked his little hands into the stranger's beard, and his mother saw with joy that the stranger held his head as though he feared to dislodge those little hands.

"No games, ma'am," he growled, "or it'll be the worse for you. We're desperate men. It's our lives we're fighting for."

"I knew that when I saw you," she said quietly.

She put some bread on the table, a mug of milk and a piece of cold meat.

"It is not much to offer you, but it is all I've got," she said. "I wish it were better, because you're wanting good wholesome food just now. I'll make some gruel for your friend and maybe there'll be an egg to-morrow, or I can set snares for a 'possum."

She took Davey from him and he turned to the table to eat. The man on the bed moaned wearily. She put Davey into his basket, lined with furry skins, and went to the sick man. The cloths that she had put over it to soak off the filthy rag which bound his head had served their purpose. She lifted them and the festering gash on his forehead was laid bare.

Her exclamation, or a twinge of pain as the air touched the wound, sharpened his brain. His eyes opened. He stared with semi-conscious gaze a moment. Then with a hoarse oath he sprang at her. His quivering lean fingers gripped her throat and clung tenaciously. The man at the table flung himself upon him and wrenched his hands away; they struggled for a moment, then the sick man dropped on to the bed again; but he shouted incoherently, his fever-bright eyes baleful by the flickering firelight.

"After the gaols, 'n the sea, 'n the bush, to be taken now and like this, by God—" he panted. "Let me be! Let me be, don't you see it's a trap!"

"It's all right," the other gasped. "Don't let your tongue run away with you, Steve."

"I'll not be taken alive," the man on the bed cried. "Not now, not after getting through so far, I'll not be taken alive, 'n the one that tries to take me'll not live either."

The tall man cursed beneath his breath.

"The woman means no harm to you," he said.

"It is the fever troubling him," Mary explained.

The sick man was already weak again. He lay on the bed limply and muttering uneasily.

"You'd best hold him so as I can put on the clean rags," she said.

She had a length of old linen, smeared with ointment from a small earthenware jar, in her hands. She laid it over the wound and gently and firmly bound it into place.

"That'll be better," she murmured.

The gaunt man overlooked her, a curious cynical humour in his eyes.

"You're a brave woman," he said.

"I'm not, indeed," she replied; but her eyes met his squarely.

She laughed softly, and told him how afraid she had been earlier in the day.

At the sound of his mother's voice, Davey piped, wistfully. She went over to him and rocked his cradle for a moment or two.

"Hush, Davey," she said talking to him softly in her native Welsh. "We have company. There's one hungry man wants his supper, and another man, sick, that thy mother must make gruel for. Do thou sing to thyself, son, till mother is ready to take thee again."

But Davey had no great notion of the laws of hospitality that separated him from the source of all consolation. He wailed incontinently and from wailing took to uttering his protest with all the strength that was in him.

The unkempt stranger munching his dry bread by the table, glanced furtively at Mary's back as she stooped over the fire stirring the gruel; then he got up and went to the cradle. He lifted the child with awkward carefulness. Davey continued to wail, nevertheless, finding that it was not the soft covering of his mother's breast that he was laid against, but a harsh fabric, smelling of the sea, the earth, dank leaves and a strange personality.

When she took the gruel from the fire and poured it into a little bowl, her eyes rested on the stranger as he tried to appease Davey.

He was cradling the child in his arms, and muttering awkwardly, distressfully: "There now! There!" An expression of awe and reflectiveness veiled the sharpness of his features. "There now! There then!" he kept saying.

He looked up to find Davey's mother's eyes resting on him and laughed a little shamefacedly.

"I think he's forgetting his company manners, surely," he said.

"You're the first company he's had to practise on," she replied.

Her simplicity, and again the clear, shining eyes with their direct and smiling glance astounded him.

"You'd best give this to your friend, yourself," she went on, putting the bowl on the table. "It seems to trouble him to see a strange face."

She lifted Davey from the stranger's arms and he took the bowl of gruel to the other man.

"Be gentle with him and humour him," she warned, "but make him eat all of it. I'll put a blanket here on the hearth for you, and Davey and I will sleep at the other end of the room."

When she had thrown all the spare clothing in the hut on the floor before the fire and had spread a patchwork quilt and the rug of 'possum skins at the far end of the room for herself, she sat down on a low stool near the door and lifted Davey's lips to her breast. She sang a half-whispering lullaby, rocking him in her arms. His cries ceased; her thoughts went off into a dreamy psalm of thanksgiving as his soft mouth pulled at her breast.

She looked up to find the eyes of the tall stranger on her.

A gaunt, long-limbed man, his clothes hung on his arms and legs as if they were the wooden limbs of a scarecrow. The shreds were knotted and tied together, and showed bare, shrunken shanks and shins, burnt and cut about, the dark hair of virility thick on them. His face, lean and leathern, had a curious expression of hunger. The eyes in it held dark memories, yet a glitter of the sun.

Mary Cameron vaguely realised that she had known what manner of man this was the moment she looked into his eyes. That was why she had not been afraid when he confronted her on the doorstep; why, too, she had been able to ask him into her house and treat him as an unexpected, but not unwelcome guest.

The man on the bed moaned. Suddenly he started up with a shrill scream.

"A wave! A wave! We'll be swamped."

His voice fell away, muttering. Then again he was crying:

"Is that the land, Dan, that line against the sky over there? No, don't y' see there—there, man. God! Don't say it isn't! How long have we been in this boat? Seems years ... been seein' the sea, them blasted little blue waves jumpin' up 'n lickin' my face! Better throw me overboard, Dan. Dan? Better throw me overboard ... can't stand it any longer. The thirst and the pain in me head, Dan."

Mary turned pitiful eyes on him, rocking Davey and hushing him gently, as he wakened and began to cry querulously.

"A sail!" the sick man shouted. "Some blasted clipper for the Port, d'y' think she'll see us, Dan? Are we too far away? Will the waves hide us?"

He sank back wearily, muttering again.

"I'll not be caught ... not be taken alive, Dan." He started up crying angrily. "I'd rather go to hell than back. A-u-gh!"

A shriek that curdled the blood in her veins, a cry that sped upwards in an uncurling scream of uncontrollable anguish, flew from the sick man. Another and another.

Mary looked at the man before her questioningly.

The lines about his nose were bent to a faint and bitter smile; but there was no smile in his eyes.

"Thinks he's being flogged," he said. "He would be if we were caught—taken back again. You know where we came