"I don't want him to, thanks," said Marcella concisely. "Why should he do it any more than me?"
But now she felt that they must get away from Mrs. King, from everyone. She began to shape her letter to her uncle in her mind, and as she did so, realized that she and Louis would be alone together no longer. They would join the communal life at Wooratonga. If he failed again--and she felt that, perhaps, he might fail--there would be critics. It came to her that it was quite impossible to go and live with her uncle and the three daughters who were "rather hard." She was not ashamed of Louis now; for that she was thankful, but she dreaded that less kindly eyes than hers should see him when he was weak.
She touched him on the cheek with her lips. He wakened at once.
"What is it, my pet?" he asked anxiously, striking a match and holding it close to her face.
"Louis, I can't let our baby come to live in Sydney," she said.
"Well, he isn't coming to Sydney to-night," he laughed.
"No. But I want it settled. Louis, I was thinking it would be a good plan to ask uncle to let us go and work for him. But now I feel I can't go among his people--"
"Not a bit, now. Only they'd never understand you as I do. And--we're fearfully happy when we don't have whisky worrying us. Don't you think we could go and live together in the Bush?"
He sat up, lit a cigarette and passed it to her. Then he lit one for himself.
"Can't you face the fact that you're going to be ill, Marcella?" he said, irritably. "You'll have to lie down for hours and all sorts of things. You're a lick to me--abso-bally-lutely! You ought not to be well like this! Lord, the things I've been told about women having babies! They simply get down to it--all except the unrefined working women."
"Then I'm an unrefined working woman, that's all," she said complacently. "Anyway, Louis, to please you or anyone else I can't pretend to be ill. Now just forget it till it gets obtrusive. I shall."
Over the roof-tops, through the moon haze streaming about the chimneys came a vision of the spaewife riding to Flodden after her man, riding from Flodden with the twin children wrapt in the Southrons' pennants. Marcella smiled a little. Louis frowned and fell in with her way of thinking. He suddenly felt flabby again. She felt taut as a steel spring.
