Lola-sue by F.W. Mole — Read

In the meantime Lola-Sue lived in the dead world of her defective mentality. Physically, she had not suffered. She was as beautiful as the day on which she had married Billy Stinson. Time, instead of ageing her with creeping insidiousness, seemed to stand still. Mentally, however, she was no better. Her case interested the professional alienists and she was transferred from Goodna to Willowburn, in the hope that the more genial climate of Toowoomba, with its greater elevation, would help to waken her out of her mental darkness. Five years had passed since her admission as a patient to the mental hospital at Goodna, and Billy Stinson got tired of the negative answers of the medical superintendent to his letters of inquiry as to the hope of his wife's early recovery. He, therefore, ceased to make further inquiries. Then it dawned on him that he, under the divorce laws of Queensland, could now petition the Supreme Court for divorce; but until he had awakened to the fact that he was now in love with Muriel Poingdestre, he had had no thought of exercising his legal right in that direction. Of late, however, his desire to possess Muriel Poingdestre, to hold her against all-comers, began to tear his honour by the roots, and to force him to break his vow to love and to cherish Lola-Sue "For ever."

Out in the undisturbed silence of the illimitable west, miles away from the head station, where he had gone to superintend the deepening of an artesian bore, Billy Stinson communed with himself.