‘My dear Augusta,’ said he, ‘you do not know what you are asking. I have a number of very important duties to perform here. My financial state is an extremely critical one. I cannot with any decency appear in Sydney when everything points to the ruin of myself and my whole order. I am sincerely sorry that you should feel life here to be so extremely _ennuyant_, but I should never, if consulted, have advised you to come; and now I am afraid you must wait until a proper escort turns up or until I can accompany you.’ ‘And when will that be?’ ‘When the rain comes, certainly not before.’ Miss Augusta said that this last contingency was as probable as the near advent of the millennium. She would wait a given time, and, that expired, would go down to Sydney as she had come up by herself. A fortnight, even three weeks, passed away. Augusta had mentioned a month as the outside limit of her forbearance. She read over and over ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’ and ‘Mariana in the South’ with quite a new appreciation of their peculiar accuracy as well as poetic sentiment. Daily she worked and read, and walked and rode, and alternately was hopeful or otherwise about the ultimate conversion of Tottie to the true faith of proper English village lowliness and reverence. Daily Ernest went forth ‘out on the run’ immediately after breakfast, reappearing only at or after sunset. Insensibly Miss Neuchamp became alarmed to find creeping over her a kind of provincial interest in the affairs of the ‘burghers of this desert city.’ She listened almost with excitement to the account of a lot of the new cattle having been followed twenty miles over the boundary and recovered by Charley Banks. She heard of a bushranger being captured about fifty miles off—this was Jack Windsor’s story; of the mail coming in twelve hours late in consequence of the horses being exhausted. Ernest gathered this from the overseer of the last lot of travelling sheep that passed through, having been locked up in Wargan Gaol for disobeying a summons. ‘Such a handsome young fellow, miss.’ This was Tottie’s contribution. What with the reading, the sewing, the teaching of Tottie, the daily cousinly walks and talks, the hitherto uncompromising Augusta became partially converted to station life, and finally admitted in conversation with Ernest that, other things being equal, she _could_ imagine a woman enduring such privation for a few years, always assuming that she had the companionship of the one man to whom alone she could freely devote every waking thought, every pulsation of the heart.