He had said, the sooner the better....

Well--he wasn't going to let even the high gods get a rise out of him.
He laughed.

By one of those strange links of association, which at moments of unexpected crisis bring back things impersonal, unconnected, the sound of his own laugh recalled the rattle of earth, upon the dry outside of a sheet of bark in which, during one of their boundary rides at Breeza Downs lately, they had wrapped for burial the body of a shepherd found dead in the bush.

Both sounds seemed to him as of something dead--something outside humanity.
He handed her back the telegram, speaking still as if he were far-off--on the other side of a grave, but quite collectedly and as though in the long silence he had been weighing the question.
'It seems to me that this has come to you in the nick of time, to solve difficulties.' 'Yes,' she assented dully.
'You've got no choice but to go as your cousin says.

There's money depending on it.' 'Money! ...