room. It had showed Sophie her father, also, between Michael and Mrs. Grant, looking from one to the other of them, and to the still figure on the bed, with a dazed, penitent expression....

The horses jogged slowly on the long, winding road. Sophie was conscious of the sunshine, warm and bright, over the plains, the fragrance of paper daisies in the air; the cuckoos calling in the distance. Her father snuffled and wiped his eyes and nose with his new handkerchief as he sat beside her.

"She was so good, Michael," he said, "too good for this world."

Michael did not reply.

"Too good for this world!" Paul murmured again.

He had said that at least a score of times this morning. Sophie had heard him say it to people down at the house before they started. She had never heard him talk of her mother like that before. She looked at him, sensing vaguely, and resenting the banality. She thought of him as he had always been with her mother and with her, querulous and complaining, or noisy and rough when he had been drinking. They had spent the night in a shed at the back of the house sometimes when he was like that....

And her mother had said:

"You'll take care of Sophie, Michael?"

Sophie remembered how she had stood in the doorway of her mother's room, that afternoon—How long ago was it? Not only a day surely? She had stood there until her mother had seen her, awed without knowing why, reluctant to move, afraid almost. Michael had nodded without speaking.

"As though she were your own child?"

"So help me, God," Michael said.

Her-mother's eyes had rested on Michael's face. She had smiled at him. Sophie did not think she had ever seen her smile like that before, although her smile had always been like a light on her face.

"Don't let him take her away," her mother had said after a moment. "I want her to grow up in this place ... in the quiet ... never to know the treacherous ... whirlpool ... of life beyond the Ridge."

Then her mother had seen and called to her.

Sophie glanced back at the slowly-moving train of vehicles. They had a dreary, dream-like aspect. She felt as if she were moving in a dream. Everything she saw, and heard, and did, was invested with unreality; she had a vague, unfeeling curiosity about everything.

"You see, Michael," her father was saying when she heard him talking again, "we'd just got out that big bit when Potch came and said that Marya ... that Marya.... I couldn't believe it was true ... and there was the opal! And when I got home in the evening she was gone. My poor Marya! And I'd brought some of the stones to show her."

He broke down and wept. "Do you think she knows about the opal, Michael?"

Michael did not reply. Sophie looked up at him. The pain of his face, a sudden passionate grieving that wrung it, translated to her what this dying of her mother meant. She huddled against Michael; in all her trouble and bewilderment there seemed nothing to do but to keep close to Michael.

And so they came to the gate of a fenced plot which was like a quiet garden on the plains. Several young coolebahs, and two or three older trees standing in it, scattered light shade; and a few head-stones and wooden crosses, painted white or bleached by the weather, showed above the waving grass and wild flowers.

Sophie held the reins when Michael got down to open the gate. Then he took his seat again and they drove in through the gateway. Other people tied their horses and buggies to the fence outside.

When all the people who had been driving, riding, or walking on the road went towards an old coolebah under which the earth had been thrown up and a grave had been dug, Michael told Sophie to go with her father and stand beside them. She did so, and dull, grieving eyes were turned to her; glances of pitiful sympathy. But Snow-Shoes came towards the little crowd beside the tree, singing.

He was the last person to come into the cemetery, and everybody stared at him. An old man in worn white moleskins and cotton shirt, an old white felt hat on his head, the wrappings of bag and leather, which gave him his name, on his feet—although snow never fell on the Ridge—he swung towards them. The flowers he had gathered as he came along, not otilypaper daisies, but the blue flowers of crowsfoot, gold buttons, and creamy and lavender, sweet-scented budda blossoms, were done up in a tight little bunch in his hand. He drew nearer still singing under his breath, and Sophie realised he was going over and over the fragment of a song that her mother had loved and used often to sing herself.

There was a curious smile in his eyes as he came to a standstill beside her. The leaves of the coolebah were bronze and gold in the sunshine, a white-tail in its branches reiterating plaintively: "Sweet pretty creature! Sweet pretty creature!" Michael, George Woods, Archie Cross, and Cash Wilson, came towards the tree, their shoulders bowed beneath the burden they were carrying; but Snow-Shoes smiled at everybody as though this were really a joyous occasion, and they did not understand. Only he understood, and smiled because of his secret knowledge.

CHAPTER II

In a week or two Mrs. Rouminof's name had dropped out of Ridge life almost as if she had never been part of it.

At first people talked of her, of Paul, of Sophie, and of Michael. They gossiped of her looks and manner, of her strange air of serenity and content, although her life on the Ridge was, they surmised, a hard one, and different from the life she had come from. But her death caused no more disturbance than a stone thrown into quiet water, falling to the bottom, does. No one was surprised, when it was known Paul and Sophie had gone to live with Michael. Everyone expected Michael would try to look after them for a while, although they could not imagine where he was going to find room for them in his small house filled with books.

It was natural enough that Michael should have taken charge of Sophie and Rouminof, and that he should have made all arrangements for Mrs. Rouminof's funeral. If it had been left to Paul to bury his wife, people agreed, she would not have been buried at all; or, at least, not until the community insisted. And Michael would have done as much for any shiftless man. He was next-of-kin to all lonely and helpless men and women on the Ridge, Michael Brady.

Every man, woman, or child on the Ridge knew Michael. His lean figure in shabby blue dungarees, faded shirt, and weathered felt hat, with no more than a few threads of its band left, was as familiar as any tree, shed, or dump on the fields. He walked with a slight stoop, a pipe in his mouth always, his head bent as though he were thinking hard; but there was no hard thought in his eyes, only meditativeness, and a faint smile if he were stopped and spoken to unexpectedly.

"You're a regular 'cyclopædia, Michael," the men said sometimes when he, had given information on a subject they were discussing.

"Not me," Michael would reply as often as not. "I just came across that in a book I was reading the other day."

Ridge folk were proud of Michael's books, and strangers who saw his miscellaneous collection—mostly of cheap editions, old school books, and shilling, sixpenny, and penny publications of literary masterpieces, poetry, and works on industrial and religious subjects—did not wonder that it impressed Ridge folk, or that Michael's knowledge of the world and affairs was what it was. He had tracts, leaflets, and small books on almost every subject under the sun. Books were regarded as his Weakness, and, remembering it, some of the men, when they had struck opal and left the town, occasionally sent a box of any old books they happened to come across to Michael, knowing that a printed page was a printed page to him in the long evenings when he lay on the sofa under his window. Michael himself had spent all the money he could, after satisfying the needs of his everyday life, on