He was surveying his new white shelf on which the matronly Mrs. Beeton seemed to incline towards the sober black New Testament and give a cold shoulder to the lean-looking “Questing Cells” and the slim “Parsifal.”  He had made and patented a very wonderful reflector for their little lamp by cutting and bending a kerosene tin in such a way that it mirrored six times the light inside.  Sitting out on the verandah he thought out the details of an arm-chair to be made out of a barrel Mr. Twist had given him.  They sat on the edge of the verandah, their legs swinging.  He was smoking—­very distastefully—­a pipe because there was plenty of strong shag at the Homestead but no cigarettes.  Marcella had been watching him; it had amazed her to see how much more calmly he had taken the cigarette famine than she had guessed possible.

“If I can go on like this, dearie,” he said at last, “there’ll be no more bogeys.  I’ve been busy—­and very happy this last week.  If I’m kept busy—­”

“You’ll be kept busy,” she said, smiling.  “When we’ve cleared the twenty acres of gorse it’s all to be ploughed and planted.  And when that’s done and there isn’t a single other thing to do, we’ll start to tunnel a hole through the middle of the earth to Lashnagar, like they did in Jules Verne’s book.”

“I’m keeping my body occupied,” he went on slowly.  “The point is, will that satisfy my brain, and all of me?”

She looked down the little slope on the top of which Castle Lashcairn stood.  The five gum trees stretched up to the cloudless night sky; a few hundred yards away the lake glimmered, star-reflecting and still.  To the left the lamp of the Homestead glowed, and “Oh Dry Those Tears” started to groan out.  Marcella waited for the line that almost sounded like a collection of bass “brrrrrs” and then she spoke.

“If you can forget yourself, my dear—­get swallowed up,” she said gently, and a silence fell between them.

The days drew into weeks.  Castle Lashcairn grew more and more beautiful; the books arrived from Sydney and kept sentry on the white shelf.  Several of her unnecessary frocks Marcella made into cushions stuffed with dried lucerne which made a most interesting crackling noise when one leaned against them.  Louis spent most of his Sundays in making a cot for his son but his fatal lack of thoroughness was a drawback, for it seemed to come to pieces as quickly as he got it together.  Marcella looked after the fowls and the cows; she did most of the cooking at the Homestead; she got the children beyond the hanger and pothook stage of writing and filled their minds, hitherto worried by family cares, with legend and fairy-tale.  She wrote often to Dr. Angus, and he sent her books and garden seeds.  All the time she and Louis never found a moment in which to be idle; about eleven o’clock every day she took his lunch across the clearing to him; she collaborated a good deal with Mrs. Beeton in making various ambitious dishes for him, but as