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“Poor Beggar, like myself. Hold the candle, carn’t you?—and hold your tongue.”

Mary was startled again by hearing the tread of a horse, but it was only the old grey munching round. Her father finished skinning, and drew the carcase up to a make-shift “gallows”. “Now you can go to bed,” he said, in a gentler tone.

She went to her bedroom—a small, low, slab skillion, built on to the end of the house—and fell on her knees by the bunk.

“God help me! God help us all!” she cried.

She lay down, but could not sleep. She was nervously ill—nearly mad, because of the dark, disgraceful cloud of trouble which hung over her home. Always in trouble—always in trouble. It started long ago, when her favourite brother Tom ran away. She was little more than a child then, intensely sensitive; and when she sat in the old bark school she fancied that the other children were thinking or whispering to each other, “Her brother’s in prison! Mary Wylie’s brother’s in prison! Tom Wylie’s in gaol!” She was thinking of it still. They were ever with her, those horrible days and nights of the first shadow of shame. She had the same horror of evil, the same fearful dread of disgrace that her mother had. She had been ambitious; she had managed to read much, and had wild dreams of going to the city and rising above the common level, but that was all past now.

How could she rise when the cruel hand of disgrace was ever ready to drag her down at any moment. “Ah, God!” she moaned in her misery, “if we could