Ah, but the end had come--come with such hideous misconception--every word spoken--and there had been so few in comparison with the immensity of the occasion--a hopeless blunder.

It had been the tussle of two opposing temperaments, it was like the rasping steel of a cross-cut saw against the hard, heavy grain of an iron-bark gum log.

Then the extraordinary involvements of circumstance.

Each incident, big and little, dovetailing and hastening the onward sweep of catastrophe.

It seemed as though Fate had cunningly engineered the forces on every plane so that there should be no escape for her victims.