After that Milli had come back. She had been away two years, she never said where. Father McCreadie had shaken his head over her, for she had not been to mass in all that time, but he had helped her to get a job at the dairy, and for the next three years they had moved only once. Then Milli met Seamus, and when Seamus said he was returning to Melbourne, Milli had announced she was going too, to be his wife. She had been happy that day, making her announcement. It was a day or so before Mrs Nimrod had come down with the summer fever, and within three days their mother was dead. But Milli had gone anyway, to be Seamus’s wife, and Alice had stood on the platform at Sydney Terminal and waved her sister goodbye.

It was Father McCreadie who had come to the rescue once more. ‘I have found you a position, Alice Nimrod,’ he had said. ‘You will go to be a maid in a big house.’

Alice ran her hand along the soft leather that covered Mrs Dunlevy’s writing desk. It was a smooth dark grey speckled with lighter flecks. Like marble, she thought. She liked the feel of nice things—soft bedding and plush curtains, rich carpets and smooth silk dresses, gloves made from fine kid leather. She had been starved of nice things for her first fourteen years and now she was surrounded by them, though they belonged to someone else. Still her fingers were drawn to them, her fingers craved their feel. It reminded her of her salvation.

But today it reminded her that Milli had had no salvation.

She withdrew her hands. There was, inside her, a dull ball of knotted and confused feelings that all the dusting and shoe cleaning and rug beating masked for a time but did not quell. The fact of Milli was at the heart of this ball. Alice’s own place in Milli’s misery was unclear to her: if she had indeed played a part in it and was in some way to blame, or if she could be her sister’s salvation, she did not know. Could Milli come here? But she doubted she could hide a cat in her room without it being discovered, and as for a position, it was unthinkable: the Dunlevys would never employ an untrained maid of Milli’s age, let alone one who was an unwed mother with a newborn.