Page:Coo-ee - tales of Australian life by Australian ladies.djvu/101

Rh 'Horrified, he galloped up to the hut to see if any one was in. There was the shepherd coolly eating his supper. "Don't you know your wife is lying dead close by?" he called out. "Yes, I do know my woman is det, because when I came home there is no fire." "But you don't mean to leave her there?" "And why not? I don't vant a det womans in the hut mit me." Luckily Barker wasn't likely to stand that sort of thing, and as he was big enough to eat the fellow, he made him bring the poor creature into the hut, and the next day they sent out from the station and had her buried.'

'But how was it,' asked Mrs. Drummond, 'that no one interfered before? Robert could not have known.'

'Most assuredly he did not; the men, most of them at any rate, did, but the right of a man to beat his wife, if he so pleases, seems quite a recognised thing. The women talked a little, or rather a great deal at first; but as the brute was married again in less than two months, I suppose they thought that the fault lay in the woman for dying, not in the man's ill--treatment of her.'

We were not so lively after this, though we did not say much more about it; but I did not find any particular fault with the change, for Mrs. Drummond became almost confidential, telling me about her childhood and early girlhood. Her mother had died when she was very young. Her father was in India. So she had been brought up by an uncle, also a widower, a hard man, who showed no more affection to her than to his own child, a girl a little younger than she was. This child, who was extremely pretty, was