In the afternoon Ernest went out for walking excursions to such points of interest, neither many nor picturesque, as the neighbourhood supplied. There was a certain ‘bend’ or curving reach of the river where, from a lofty bluff, the red walls of which the rushing tide had channelled for ages, a striking and uncommon view was obtained. The vast plain, here diversified by the giant eucalypti which fringed the winding watercourse, stretched limitless to the horizon. But all was apparently barren from Dan to Beersheba. The reed-beds were trampled and eaten down to the last cane. The soft rich alluvium in which they grew was cracked, yet hard as a brickfield. How different from the swaying emerald billows with feathered tasselled crests which other summers had seen there! Something of this sort had Ernest endeavoured to explain to Miss Neuchamp when she spoke disrespectfully of the trodden cloddy waste, contrasting it scornfully with the velvet meads which bordered English rivers. But Augusta, defective in imagination, never believed in anything she did not see. Therefore a reed-bed appeared to her mental vision till the day of her death always as a species of abnormal dismal swamp, lacking the traditional element of moisture. Other explorations were made in the cool hours of the evening, but gradually Miss Neuchamp tired of the monotonous aspect of matters. The dusty tracts were not pleasant to her feet. The mosquitoes assailed her with savage virulence, whether she walked at sunrise, mid-day, or darkening eve. If she sat down on the river bank and watched the shallow but still pure and gleaming waters, ants of every conceivable degree of curiosity or ferocity discomposed her. There was no rest, no variety, no beauty, no ‘proper’ wood, valley, mountain, or brook. She could not imagine human beings living constantly in such a hateful wilderness. If Ernest had not all his life, and now most of all, developed a talent for useless and incomprehensible self-sacrifice, he would abandon such a spot for ever. Mr. Neuchamp felt himself pressed to his last entrenchments to defend his position; Fate seemed to have arrived personally, masked, not for the first time in man’s strange story, in the guise of a woman. That woman, too, his persistent, inexorable cousin Augusta. ‘The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.’ The heavens,—dead to the dumb, imploring looks of the great armies of perishing brutes, to the prayers of ruined men; the earth, with withered herb and drying streamlet gasping and faint, breathless, under the burning noon and the pitiless dry moon rays,—alike conspired against him! And now his cousin, who, with all her faults and defects, was stanchly devoted to her kindred and what she believed to be their welfare, came here to madden him with recollections of the wonderland of his birth, and to fill him with ignoble longings to purchase present relief by the ruinous sacrifice of purpose and principle.