glanced with horror at her radiant face; and again he noticed her hair.
“Where’s it all gone to, Peggy?” he asked, pointing to the short strong locks. “What have you done with it?”
They had reached the outskirts of Parramatta; new buildings were springing up in every direction, and Peggy jerked her head towards some scaffoldings.
“Is it where me hair’s gone?” she said with a laugh. “Mebbe there’s some of ’t there!”
“Where, Peggy?”
“In them new buildin’s, like as not. An’ didn’t ye hear they strengthen the morthar wid the hair of the women’s heads. ’Tis thrue, then, in Parramatta. An’ ’tis mighty kind they think themselves to give us the razor instid o’ the cat—but where’s their bricks an’ morthar if they bet us?”
“They used that glorious hair for bricks and mortar!”
His praise of it was dearer far than her possession; she coloured with pride and happiness as she told him it happened long ago, when first she came there.
“But why did it happen?” he asked indignantly. “What could you have done to deserve such treatment?”
She hesitated, and squeezed his arm.
“Nat Sullivan came—”
“Nat Sullivan!”
“An’ I was to swear whether or not you were one of the bushrangers; so you may think what I swore; an’ he said I was a liar, an’ I struck ’m in the face wid me open hand; an’ they shaved me for that!”
Tom felt miserable; she had suffered for him all along; how could he tell her he was deceiving her now, and had
