She shrugged. "I'm perfectly all right. Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred."

  "I see what you mean, and you're right. It will be very pleasant for you, hearing young voices in the house."

  "Oh, they won't live here," she said. "They can live in the head stockman's house down by the creek, well away from me. I'm not fond of children or their voices."

  "Isn't that a rather shabby way to treat your only brother, Mary? Even if your ages are so disparate?"

  "He'll inherit-let him earn it," she said crudely.

 

  Fiona Cleary was delivered of another boy six days before Meggie's ninth birthday, counting herself lucky nothing but a couple of miscarriages had happened in the interim. At nine Meggie was old enough to be a real help. Fee herself was forty years old, too old to bear children without a great deal of strength-sapping pain. The child, named Harold, was a delicate baby; for the first time anyone could ever remember, the doctor came regularly to the house.

  And as troubles do, the Cleary troubles multiplied. The aftermath of the war was not a boom, but a rural depression. Work became increasingly harder to get.

 

  Old Angus MacWhirter delivered a telegram to the house one day just as they were finishing tea, and Paddy tore it open with trembling hands; telegrams never held good news. The boys gathered round, all save Frank, who took his cup of tea and left the table. Fee's eyes followed him, then turned back as Paddy groaned. "What is it?" she asked.

  Paddy was staring at the piece of paper as if it held news of a death. "Archibald doesn't want us."

  Bob pounded his fist on the table savagely; he had been so looking forward to going with his father as an apprentice shearer, and Archibald's was to have been his first pen. "Why should he do a dirty thing like this to us, Daddy? We were due to start there tomorrow."

  "He doesn't say why, Bob. I suppose some scab contractor undercut me." "Oh, Paddy!" Fee sighed.

  Baby Hal began to cry from the big bassinet by the stove, but before Fee could move Meggie was up; Frank had come back inside the door and was standing, tea in hand, watching his father narrowly. "Well, I suppose I'll have to go and see Archibald," Paddy said at last. "It's too late now to look for another shad to replace his, but I do think he owes me a better explanation than this. We'll just have to hope we can find work milking until Willoughby's shed starts in July."