Then, instead of returning to Lady Bridget's room, he attacked an escritoire in the parlour in which he had kept family and private papers, and which flanked her Chippendale bureau.

He brought out another collection--notebooks, papers, bundles of letters dating much further back than his occupation of Moongarr--salvage from the wreck of his old home.

His mother's workbox; his father's SHAKESPEARE; the family Bible--a piteous catalogue.

He looked long at the book and the photographs.

These last were portraits of his father, his mother and his sisters, who had all been massacred by the Blacks, when he was a boy.