was nothing personal in such moods there was nothing she could do but ignore them.
This was the first bad one he had had since they had been in Sydney. Up till then he had been so much better that she had even begun to hope that love would get the best of the weaknesses that had, she thought, been encouraged a good deal by loneliness. When she had seen him growing listless and eating less a week before, she had suggested he go down to the coast, as he had done when alone, but when he saw she did not want to go with the cottagers there he did not want to either. He was becoming more and more dependent on her for company. Even when he did not want to talk he liked to know she was near him.
She walked round the house and about the garden. She did not like to call for him, knowing that when he wanted her he would come for her himself. But she would have liked to have known he was there, and that he had not gone to Mac’s.
Then she told herself she was silly to anticipate. That was what so many women did. She began to think again of the end of Captain Scott and his gallant little band. What a story! She sat abashed and shaken before it. It seemed to her the most wonderful thing in the world that men could face death and make of it what those men made of it. Surely when men could die like that there was something beyond. Unconsciously her mind began to work on it, and she wondered if she could write what she felt about it. Dane had been wired to from three papers for an article. Perhaps he had gone off to think about that, and it would be fine, she thought, if she could do anything that was good enough for publication. After walking about for a while she went inside, and seeing the supper tray with wine and cold food that was usually left
