‘Your mother seems a person of excellent sense, Mary Anne, and I must say that I _fully agree with her_,’ said Miss Neuchamp, with her most unbending expression, designed to modify her attendant’s lightness of tone. ‘Depend upon it, unhappiness and misfortune invariably follow the attempt to quit an allotted station in life.’ ‘Oh, that be hanged for a yarn! Oh, I beg your pardon, miss,’ said Tottie confusedly, for she was on the point of relapsing into the Rainbar vernacular. ‘But surely every one ain’t bound to stop where they’re planted, good soil or bad, water or no water, like a corn-seed in a cow track or a pumpkin in a tree stump! Men and women have it in ’em to forage about a bit, else how do some people get on so wonderfully. I’ve read about self-help, and all that, and heaps of people beginning with half-a-crown and making fortunes. Ought they to have thrown the half-crown away or the fortune after they had made it?’ ‘No doubt some people are apparently favoured,’ said Miss Augusta, regarding Tottie’s argument as another result of the over-education of ‘these sort of persons.’ ‘In the end it is often the worst thing that can befall them. Now let us canter.‘ When Augusta Neuchamp had remained for a fortnight at Rainbar she began to perceive that the monotonous existence likely to be unreasonably prolonged would serve no object either of pleasure or profit. No amount of residence would teach her an iota more of the nature of such an establishment as Rainbar than she knew already. What was there to learn? The plains within sight of the cottage needed but to be indefinitely multiplied; and what then? An area of country equally arid, barren, unspeakably desolate. Other droves and herds of cattle equally emaciated. Nothing possibly could be in her eyes more hopeless and horrible than these endless death-stricken, famine-haunted wastes. Why did Ernest stay here? She had tried her utmost to induce him to abandon the whole miserable delusion, quoting the arguments of Mr. Jermyn Croker until he spoke angrily about that gentleman and closed the debate. The obvious thing to do was to return to Sydney, but even this comparatively simple step was difficult to carry out. Miss Neuchamp did not desire again to tempt the perils of the road unattended. She had taken it for granted that Ernest, the most complying and good-natured of men ordinarily, would return to Sydney with her; and she had trusted to the influence of civilisation and her steady persuasion to prevail upon him to return to England to his friends, and to what she deemed to be his fixed and unalterable position in life. On this occasion she met with unexpected opposition. Ernest positively declined to quit his station at present.