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104 not see, yet; she felt this, vaguely; and it was this that filled her with despair.

It was green grass that she gazed out upon from the morning-room window, as the trouble deepened in her eyes; and in Australia she had seldom seen grass that was green. But just then she would have given all the meadows of England for one strip of dry saltbush plain, with the sun dropping down behind the far-away line of sombre, low-sized scrub, and the sand-hills flushing in the blood-red light, and the cool evening wind coming up from the south. The picture was very real to her—as real, for the moment, as this shaven grass-plot, and the line of tall trees that shadowed it, with their trunks indistinguishable, in this light, against the old brick wall. Then she sighed, and the vision vanished—and she thought of Alfred.

'He can't go on loving me always, unless I improve,' she said dismally. 'I must get more like his own people, and get on better with them, and all that. I must! Yet he doesn't tell me how to set to work; and it's hard to find out for oneself. I am trying; but it's very hard. If only somebody would show me how! For, unless I find out, he