The sick woman wavered, and for a moment the terrible gaze, transfixing Missy, turned, by comparison, almost soft. Then it shifted and fell upon the bearded face of him who was supporting the unhappy girl, and moment, mood and chance were gone, all three, beyond redemption. “John William,” said his mother, “leave her alone. Do you hear me? Let her go!” Nothing happened. “Let her go!” screamed Mrs. Teesdale. “Choose once and for all between us—your dying mother and—that—woman!” At first nothing; then the man's hand dropped clear of the girl. “Now go,” said the woman to the girl. The girl fled into the gun-room, and so out into the night, only pausing to shut the doors behind her, one after the other. With the shutting of the outer door—it was not slammed—they heard the last of Missy. “Now follow her,” said the mother to the man. But the man remained. CHAPTER XXI.—“FOR THIS CAUSE.” Now there was nothing but wet grass between the gun-room window and the river-timber; and that way lay the Dandenong Ranges; therefore it was clearly Missy's way—until she stopped to think. This was not until she had very nearly walked into the Yarra itself; it was only then that she came to know what she was doing, to consider what she must do next, and to recall coherently the circumstances of her last and final expulsion from the farmhouse of the Teesdales. Already it seemed to have happened hours ago, instead of minutes. The hat and jacket she had snatched up from the sofa were still upon her arm; she put them on now, because suddenly she had turned cold. Another moment and she could not have said on which arm she had carried them, she had carried them so short a time. Yet the deathly face and the deathlier voice of Mrs. Teesdale were as a horror of old standing; there was something so familiar about them; they seemed to have dwelt in her memory so long. But, indeed, her mind was in a mist, through which the remote and the immediate past loomed equally indistinct and far away. The mist parted suddenly. One face shone through it with a baleful light. It was the dreadful face of Mrs. Teesdale. “Dying!” exclaimed Missy, eyeing the face judicially in her mind. “Dying? Not she—not now! She may have been dying; but she won't die now. No, I've saved her by dragging her off her deathbed to curse me and turn me out! I've heard of folks turning the corner like that. She was right enough, though. You can't blame her and call her unkind. The others are more to blame for going on being kind to one of my sort. No, she'd better not die now, she'd much better leave that to me.” Her mind was in a mist. She tried to see ahead. She must live somewhere, and she must do something for her living. But what—but where?